Monero ({{XMR}}) fell roughly 30% on Tuesday to its lowest price in 20 months after cryptocurrency exchange Binance announced it would stop trading privacy tokens as of February 20.
The exchange said in a blog post that Monero and the three other tokens it is delisting – Aragon (ANT), Multichain (MULTI) and Vi (VAI) – no longer meet the standards expected by Binance.
“If a coin or token no longer meets these standards or the industry changes, we may conduct a more detailed review and delist it,” Binance said.
Privacy coins are cryptocurrencies that hide the flow of funds across the network to maintain anonymity and make it difficult to determine who sent what to whom. This has made them unpopular with regulators and law enforcement. Cryptocurrency exchange OKX announced late last year that it would delist privacy-focused tokens such as XMR, Dash {{DASH}}, and ZCash (ZCH).
Following the announcement, Monero fell to $114.26, its lowest since June 2022, according to data from TradingView.
MultiChain, then one of the cryptocurrency world's largest bridge protocols, suffered a $130 million breach in July. A week later, the company announced it was suspending operations after CEO Zhao Jun and his sister were detained by Chinese police. The token fell 36% to $1.36 today, according to CoinMarketCap data.
Aragon’s token, a blockchain-based platform that allows users to build and manage their own decentralized autonomous organizations, remains largely unchanged, just like Vai’s token.
Token withdrawals will not be supported after May 20th.
read more: Binance Attempts to Re-Enter UK Market but Faces Regulatory Headwinds: Bloomberg
Update (February 6th 12:32 UTC): Add details on other delisted tokens, quotes from the announcement, and background/context on privacy tokens.
Updated (February 6th 15:53 UTC): Rewrote first paragraph to focus on price movement, add multichain, Aragon details, and update prices
