Monero Back at $650: Is Leverage Setting Up a January Repeat?

What we're seeing is it's an interesting phenomenon for sure. There's been a massive, you know, really re-basement. You're seeing leverage being flushed out of the system really at levels that we haven't seen before. We're also seeing the fact that if you look at really any order book across the world, you're not necessarily seeing a marginal net buyer here. Everything is is pointing towards a net seller.

Leverage being flushed out. Now, that was February, the same week Monero fell into $300. And in January had to run a record of about $797. So, Thursday, 22nd of October, Monero went back above $650 for the first time since January. Now, I know you're thinking, all right, but let me say this, a lot of Monero holders saw that and thought, here we go.

New highs are next. And maybe, but the borrowed money betting on Monero is back near January's record. A lot like the setup last time. And on the day it passed 650 on the big exchanges, one data firm actually tracked futures traded about 23 times more Monero than the normal market did. I'm going to show you that gap, right?

And why it matters even if you've never ever borrowed a penny. And two-minute check that you can do on what's really behind a move like this. And there's a link in the description, guys. The first one is changed how a lot of people handle the big calls on coins like this. I'm going to be telling you exactly why before we're 5 minutes in.

Because if you are holding Monero, then this comes down to one question. If it runs again, will you keep the gains this time or will you just give them back like in January? By the end of this, guys, you're going to know what's really pushing the price, what happened last time, and the three decisions it's going to leave you with. All right? And that's my hope for this video, and I'm only going to give my opinion on the facts, but let's say first, the plain version.

Monero is a coin built from privacy from the start. On Bitcoin, anyone can look up any wallet, right? And I I hope you know this, and they can see every payment. On Monero, the amounts and the people sending and receiving are hidden. They're hidden by default.

Here's Riccardo Spagni, who led Monero's development for years, on where it came from. Let's watch.

It started off with this white paper by a guy called Nicolas van Saberhagen, and he wrote this white paper for a protocol that he called CryptoNote. And what he What he had basically done is he'd taken Bitcoin and he'd said, "Look, Bitcoin does a bunch of stuff really well. Here's what we like about Bitcoin, but here's some things that we think could improve." And it was primarily on uh the privacy side. So, that's the true innovation of CryptoNote. It was like, "Look at all the privacy improvements that we can make."

Primarily on the privacy side. And and one plain thing while we're here, right? Privacy is how Monero's built and what its hold is value. It isn't a way around the taxman. Coins in your own wallet are still yours to report and pay tax on.

Same as anything, right? So, here's what moved this week. Monero's been climbing for weeks. From around $320 in July, on Thursday it actually pushed past 650 and it was one of the only handful of big coins that went up on a red day for the market. But here's the bit worth slowing down on.

The amount of money in open bets on Monero's futures has gone back above $300 million. That's within touching distance of January's record, about $320 million. Zcash, the other big privacy coin, has a huge year, too, right? Question is, how much of this move is people buying the coin? That's the biggest question.

And how much is people betting on it? Now, my first take, the interest is real. But a move this fast with this much borrowed money behind it is when holders need a plan. All right, you really do. So, we're going to get into this.

Welcome back to the Bull Runners channel. You know what this channel does now. If you're brand new here, hit the subscribe button cuz we give absolute facts. We don't take sides, we give our opinion, and we research, and we spend every day bettering ourselves inside this market by learning what is real. Okay?

So, tell me yours in the comments. I'm going to give you both sides because a coin going up is the easy easy bit to make a video on, but knowing what to do about it, that's the hard bit that no one really tells you.

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All right, picture this, right? You've held a coin for years. Finally runs, you check the price every hour, and you tell yourself you'll take some off at the next round number, and then it goes higher. So, you wait again, and then one morning it's down 20%. You tell yourself it's going to come back up, don't worry.

And when it comes back up, I'm going to take it. A month later you're back where you started, and the gain you had on the screen is just a screenshot. Most of us have done that, right? It's not once. Either the traders on the other side of those moves have their rules written down way before anything happens.

So, most people holding a bag have a feeling and a phone and a habit habit of deciding on the day when that's the hardest moment to decide. Now, that's exactly why the first link is here, right? Instead of deciding the moment, you've got a team reading the stuff every single week, and it all it starts with is a short free video and a free chat about your coins and the plan for them. Now, I'm going to tell you properly about this at the end, so stay till then, okay? But, if this is already hitting home, guys, hit the link and have a look.

Now, those open bets have a name. They're called open interest. So, what is it, and why should you care if you just hold Monero in a wallet? Well, futures like traders bet on a price with borrowed money, and that's what leverage means. Here's how Kraken, one of the biggest exchanges, explains it

in its own guide. Perpetual futures also introduce something called leverage, which allows you to open a larger positions using smaller amounts of upfront capital. Leverage does increase your exposure to price movement, but it also increases risk. So, it needs to be used carefully. And a final thing to understand about perpetual futures is that because these positions don't expire in the traditional sense, they use something called a funding rate.

This is a small payment exchanged between long and short positions every 8 hours, and helps keep the contract price aligned with the underlying market price.

It also increases risk. Now, that's the exchange itself saying it. So, open interest is just the total size of all those open bets, and the funding rate is a fee. Now, when most traders are betting on a rise, they pay the ones betting on a fall to keep their bets open. The higher that fee, the more crowded the bet.

And in July, a trading firm explained it to an advisory committee at America's markets regulator, the CFTC. And this is the part that actually matters.

Really the rubber band theory. The idea is the further thing the perpetual future moves in terms of either to a premium or discount, there's an incentive economic kind of incentive for somebody to come in and push that back into line with the index price. And so, many of these groups that we've seen so far often have a cap on the 8-hours kind of window that we're talking about. It's often around 2%. I think so then people need to understand again that could be up to 6%.

In a 24-hour cycle, it could also be zero and it

The rubber band theory. So, when lots of people pile in borrowed money, the rubber band stretches and they pay to hold it there. Now, here's the catch, right? If the price drops even a bit, the exchange closes the weakest bets automatically. Now, that's called a liquidation.

And every founder sale pushes the price lower, so that knocks out the next lot. Monero's had its own warning signs before, right? Back in September, the open bets on Monero jumped 18% in a single day and every single time the bets build up like that, the rubber band gets tighter and tighter. And Monero's own chart shows what happens next. In January this year, it went on a tear, right?

It actually hit a record of about $797 on Wednesday, the 14th of January. Open bets hit a record of that month, too, at about $320 million. Now, price and borrowed bets climbing together, the setup people are pointing at now. One on-chain investigator, ZachXBT, linked part of that run to a large wallet swapping a huge sum into Monero. Now, within a week that rally had turned. it was down nearly 40% on a day with about $850 million of bets were wiped across crypto.

And by the first week of February, it was under $300. So, think about what that meant for someone who bought near the top and just held. Even at 650, they'd still be about a fifth down, right? 9 months later, that would be. So, this not just a Monero thing.

Here's actually CNBC showing what a flush looks like across crypto back in September last year.

So, Brian, whereas easier US monetary policy has really lifted gold and equities, steam is coming out of crypto after last week's Fed cut rally. So, you've got Solana, Ether, and Bitcoin. You were just pointing to the chart. They're all sliding as traders unwind their bullish bets. That has pushed the overall market value back below $4 trillion.

I was looking at CoinGlass CoinGlass data. They say about $1.7 billion in positions liquidated over the past 24 hours. $1.6 billion of that was long. That is the biggest force selling that we've seen since late March.

The biggest force selling. Now, did you catch who got hurt there? The people betting on a rise, right? But everyone holding those coins watch the price fall with them. Now, to be fair, there is a real bear case here, and Monero holders should hear it because of the privacy.

A lot of big exchanges have stopped offering privacy. Binance dropped it in February 2024, Kraken stopped offering it to customers in Europe later that year, and in January this year, Dubai's financial regulatory banned privacy coins on the exchanges it oversees, and like in India, reportedly told its exchanges to restrict them. Fewer places to simply buy and hold means a thinner normal market, and a thin market, that's the easy way for the future to crowds to push around. That's a fair point, right? So, the answers from Monero supporters is that it's still traded on plenty of venues and swapped peer-to-peer, and that the people who hold it for privacy, they're not going anywhere.

Both can be true at once, right? So, if you hold Monero, it's worth knowing which kind of money is moving the price any given day. So, who's right? The people calling new highs, or the people warning about January? Well, both sides, in my opinion, have a point, and you're the one holding this, you need to choose what you believe.

The honest way to answer it is to look at where the trading actually happens, so let's do that. Here's the number almost no one put in a headline. In the 24 hours to Thursday, CoinGlass, which tracks the big exchanges, counted about $425 million of Monero futures trading. The normal market, what traders call spot, where people actually buy and sell the coin, came to about 18 million on those same exchanges. That's about $23 of futures for every $1 of spot.

23 to 1, right? That's the gap. Now, Monero spot trading is spread across smaller venues, too, so the true gap is smaller than that. But, on the big exchanges, a lot of the trading behind the move is in bets, it's not coins changing hands. That doesn't make the rally fake, all right?

Monero's been climbing for months, but it means the price can move a long way very fast in either direction, and that's on money that isn't staying. Now, remember what that trading firm told the regulator in July.

I think it's key to understand the risk has moved into the funding rate, and that's what you need to understand.

So, in other words, from that, watch what it costs to keep the bets open, not just the price. Here's one for free, right? And it takes 2 minutes. Before you decide anything on a coin that's running, look up two numbers: its open interest and its future volumes against its spot volume. CoinGlass shows both for free, and if the future side is many times bigger than the price is being driven by borrowed bets, then do one more thing.

Write down the price where you take some profit and the price where you'd stop and rethink. Write it before the move, not during it. And there's one more thing that check can't tell you on its own. I'll come to it in a second, right? That's one check.

The rest, like how much to take off and when and what to do with it after, depends on what you're on back. And that's the bit the team goes through with its members. So, what happens next? Nobody knows if Monero breaks January's record or rolls over. There's one number I'm watching on this and I'm going to give you it right at the end.

But remember, when a big flush happens, it doesn't just hit the traders, right? It can hit the whole market for weeks. Now, here's Funstrat's Tom Lee on CNBC last November on what the October 2025 wipeout left behind.

market has been limping along since October 10th. Because on that date was a negative shock. I mean, today's stock market looks a lot like an echo of what happened on October 10th. But on October 10th, that liquidation was so big, Brian. It really crippled market makers.

And our market makers are critical in crypto because they provide liquidity.

Limping along, that's what a big flush leaves behind. It's not one bad day, it's weeks of nobody wanting to buy. The ones who came through it calmly had usually decided that numbers before started. So, some of you are going, "Fair enough, but I don't use leverage, so this doesn't touch me." All right, I hear you. But plenty of people holding Monero in January never borrowed a penny either.

Now, if you held it on the 14th of January and did nothing, then you watched more than half of it go by early February. With the borrow bets being flushed out on the way down. Not using leverage keeps you from being wiped out. Now, it doesn't keep you from giving it back. All right, and my honest take is Monero's rally is real and it's actually been building for months with genuine interest in privacy behind it.

What it changes how carefully we decide before the move what we'll do with the gains. So, if you're writing numbers down this time, pop XMR in the comments, okay? Quick recap. Monero's back over 650, the open bets are near January's record, and there's far, far, far more futures trading than spot trading. Last time, that setup didn't end well for people without a plan.

So, the plan has to come before the move. That leaves you with three decisions, right? First decision, what price would you take some profit and is it written down? Second decision, where does your Monero actually sit on an exchange that could stop offering it or does it sit somewhere you hold the keys to? Third, is that money working for you while you wait or just sitting there?

Because if you haven't decided and a big flush comes, it'll decide for you. So, for me guys, the plan comes first from the price comes second, right? So, here's what all that really shows. Every single rally looks the same from the inside. Yes, exciting, all right?

Then it's obvious, then it's gone. Most of us have watched a gain appear on the screen and then quietly disappeared because we never decided in advance what we do. And that's not because we're daft, right? That's nobody ever actually sat us down, showed us how to plan an exit before the price moved. And I'm not going to tell you what to do with your bag in a video because that depends on what you're holding and how it's set up.

But, you don't have to work it out on your own. That's the thing, right? It's not hard. What our private intelligence network is for, guys, is most of you. And everything I bring you on this channel, or pretty much 99% of it, comes from inside that and that goes way deeper inside of there, all right?

Way deeper than I can do in a 15-minute video. So, the research team digs into where this is heading, members hear it first, and every single week there's a call where the team walks you through how they're reading it, and also when they're buying and taking profit themselves. So, you're not just guessing when a rally's running on borrowed money. Now, they're going to help you get on it your own keys, so no bank or exchange can freeze it. They'll show you how to get what you're already holding earning instead of sat there.

And everyone in there is holding a decent bag and they're in it for the long haul. So, it's the same as you, same as me. Now, honestly, I'd be a lot further on myself if we'd started Altcoin Pro way back, right? And if you've tried that check earlier and realized that you haven't got a price written down, then you're going to be in the same boat as many people in January. That's exactly what the free 50-minute call is for.

Giving gains back usually comes from deciding on hype instead of a plan. Now, one of our members, Rebecca, actually put it better than I can. This is a real review, guys, that she left on Trustpilot. You can check it. She says the biggest difference no longer making portfolio decisions based on market in hype.

She understands what's happening and she has a process that she feels comfortable making her own decisions with. A lot less FOMO, too, is what she says, right? That's the fear of missing out and it's what makes most of us hang on too long. Now, results like Rebecca's are exceptional and they didn't happen by sitting still. So, go and be exceptional yourself.

Now, you could leave this and hope the time it works out for you and try and piece it together yourself, midnight freaking out, refreshing a price chart, but don't be like everyone else. I'd rather you spent 15 minutes on the call, came away with a plan for your bag. It's absolutely free, so worst case, you come away just with a clearer mind. Here's what I do. I tap more on this video, hit the very first link, watch the short free briefing, then book your free 15-minute call with someone on the team underneath it.

They're going to go through with you everything, all right? They're going to literally treat your crypto bag like it's a brand new portfolio and what you could do with it. Now, just hit the first link, guys. Very, very simple, all right? They're very straight to you.

Pause this, do it now, and then simply go away and think about what I've said in this video, okay? Because everything in this Altcoin Pro is built for people holding $50,000 or more in crypto that don't know how to make the most of that. If that's you guys, hit the link. If it's not you, you're absolutely fine. Just keep watching the videos until you're at that point, okay?

So, I'm going to be making videos every single day. I hope you enjoyed this one. As always, stay bullish. Oh.