Monero avoids crypto market rout, but XMR price still risks 20% drop by June

Monero (XMR) has shown a surprising resilience against the Federal Reserve's hawkish policies that pushed the prices of most of its crypto rivals — including the top dog Bitcoin (BTC) — lower last week. 

XMR's price closed the previous week 2.37% higher at $217, data from Binance shows. In comparison, BTC, which typically influences the broader crypto market, finished the week down 11.55%. The second-largest crypto, Ether (ETH), also plunged 11% in the same period.

While the crypto market wiped off $163.25 billion from its valuation last week, down nearly 9%, Monero's market cap increased by $87.7 million, suggesting that many traders decided to seek safety in this privacy-focused coin. 

XMR near critical support

Monero started the new week with a selloff, with XMR plunging by nearly 4% to around $208 on May 9.

The decline brought the token near its key support level — the 50-week exponential moving average (50-day EMA; the red wave in the chart below) near $214. The wave also coincides with another price floor — the 0.618 Fib line of the Fibonacci retracement graph drawn from the $38-swing low to the $491-swing low.

Interestingly, XMR's price drop is part of a pullback move that began April 21 from about $290. In turn, the reversal to the downside surfaced amid a falling wedge breakout whose upside target comes to be around $490.  

That could result in either of these two outcomes: XMR breaks below its support confluence around $214 to test the wedge's upper trendline as support (which also coincides with the token's 200-week EMA near $161.50); OR the token rebounds from the support confluence and continue its move towards the wedge's technical upside target near $490.

The overall crypto market trend looks biased towards bears in a higher interest rate environment. This, coupled with Monero's erratic but consistent positive correlation with Bitcoin, could eventually weigh XMR lower, resulting in a decline toward the wedge's top around $160 in Q2, down about 20% from today's price. 

Strong XMR fundamentals

XMR's bearish setup could see a period of price spikes as Monero inches closer to its tentative hard fork, scheduled for July 16.

Related: Making crypto conventional by improving crypto crime investigations worldwide

A testnet version of the same technical upgrade expects to come out on May 16, according to Monero's GitHub post. The team behind the project has confirmed that the hard fork would improve Monero's network security while cutting fees. 

#Monero has a network upgrade (hardfork) on July 16th 2022 at block 2668888.

Privacy and performance will be improved!

The update includes:
Ring sizes will increase from 11 to 16 View tags to speedup wallet/node sync
Multisig fixes
Bulletproof+
+more!#xmr$xmrpic.twitter.com/jZ5ouk1uqo

— John Foss (@johnfoss69) April 17, 2022

Meanwhile, demand for Monero expects to rise higher in 2022 due to its promise of providing anonymity. For instance, XMR emerged as a choice of crypto among ransomware attackers, with a CipherTrade study showing a 500% increase in the token's usage in 2021. 

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