With a currency that values privacy, and without a public ledger, no one can see your wallet balance – even for exchanges. Grassroots action through a “Monerun” – like a bank run – is challenging the resilience of exchange reserves, and more importantly, fractional holdings that appear to be more common than once thought.

Monero is one of the most active cryptocurrency communicates where it is listed as having the third-highest number of developers, only behind Bitcoin and Ethereum. This community’s activity drive for more privacy in a non-fiat economy means constant weaknesses in the currency system to acquire XMR will be revealed more easily.

A Reddit post calls for users to withdraw their XMR from all crypto exchanges on April 18th. This collective action makes for an interesting tale of forcing centralised exchanges to prove their actual reserves by allowing withdrawal. While it is a traditional bank run, of sorts, it does also infer that XMR tokens can be accounted for.

With an increasing number of Centralised Exchanges (CEX) encouraging leveraged trading on their platforms, the ability to “over-borrow” for trades now exists. Many crypto buyers and traders do not all withdraw their holdings. This, therefore, allows for the possibility for CEXs to inaccurately declare their reserves. For XMR, a privacy centered coin, this is a more serious concern than usual as its ledger is intentionally anonyimised or obscured. Though the ability exists to allow transactions to be seen, this feature needs to be manually changed by the sender/receiver.

In this scenario, exchanges are then able to overstate their XMR holdings and misrepresent the liquidity available. Proving that XMR is more scarce than seen on CEXs will ensure the price will rise to reflect the new level of liquidity.

Reminiscent of other organically organised groups like WallStreetBets and WallStreetSilver, Monerun is effectively a challenge to force accurate accounting of all XMR in circulation.

“What is, this WSB meets Monero?” you might ask. Yes indeed, and here’s why:

Monero’s obfuscated ledger has enabled a number of exchanges to misrepresent their reserves, and sell XMR that they don’t actually have, knowing that all too many of us will never withdraw, and no one can see onchain the evidence of their misdeeds.

u/bawdyanarchist

If withdrawals are successful then it would indicate that exchanges are meeting their obligations to meet user commitments – so no shady business then. However, if some CEXs are stopping XMR requests then it will prove that there is a phantom or shadow economy of XMR that never really exists, except for the accounts of exchanges. This defeats the purpose of crypto where a currency is now a public product and does not belong to anyone, and cannot be created at will.