Monero Price Rejected at $548 but Holds a 21% Weekly Gain

• Monero reversed sharply after touching $548.17, closing well below the session high.
• The coin still holds a 21.12% gain across the week.
• The THORChain swap route behind the rally has not been activated yet.
• All three moving averages sit far below price, leaving room for a deeper pullback.

Monero (XMR) traded at $513.62 on Monday, August 31, after a session that carried it to $548.17 and then handed most of that advance back within hours. The 24-hour change reads just 0.98%, a figure that understates the volatility inside the day, since the comparison point already sat near the highs. Across the week the picture is different: XMR is up 21.12%, with market capitalization at $9.65 billion and 24-hour turnover of $231.15 million.

The reversal matters more than the gain. Monero spent August grinding through resistance that had held since June, and the first attempt to extend beyond it met sellers immediately.

THORChain built the Monero route but has not switched it on yet

THORChain shipped version 3.20 on August 25, and the wire release most outlets carried overstated what actually shipped. The upgrade did not open native Monero swaps. It delivered the infrastructure underneath them: key generation and signing work tied to Monero’s FROST threshold scheme, vault rotation, transaction observation and recovery. Activation was left as a separate step.

That step slipped. On August 27 THORChain postponed activation of both Monero and Zcash support by one to two weeks, citing network stability as the priority. Activation has not happened, so no XMR is routing through it yet. The market is pricing a capability that exists in code and not yet in production.

The caution has a specific origin. THORChain lost $10.7 million to an exploit in May and shut down swaps, vault signing, chain observation and node churn for roughly a month while engineers audited the vulnerability, resuming full operations only in late June. Introducing an unfamiliar signing scheme weeks after that restart is exactly the situation where a protocol delays rather than ships.

Moving XMR into the wider market has meant routing through a centralized exchange, a custodial service or a chain of intermediary steps, all of which reintroduce the counterparty exposure and identity checks that Monero holders specifically avoid. A native swap settles on each chain in its own asset, with no wrapped representation and nobody holding the coins in between.

Travel platform Epic announced separately on August 25 that it accepts XMR for flight and hotel bookings across more than two million properties, adding Monero to a list of over 200 supported assets. The direct volume impact is small. The signal is that merchant-side integration has continued through a period when regulated exchanges were moving the other way.

Monero ($XMR) is now accepted on Epic.

You can now use your Monero ($XMR) to book 2M+ flights and hotels at up to 30% below Booking,com.

Epic is crypto's travel layer accepting 200+ cryptocurrencies, including Monero (@monero). pic.twitter.com/7O1AfT0tO2

— EPIC Travel (@EpicOnChain) August 25, 2026

Why three years of delistings never produced the price collapse everyone expected

Monero spent 2024 and 2025 being removed from regulated venues across Europe and Asia under rules treating non-traceable assets as incompatible with transaction monitoring duties. The conventional read was that shrinking regulated liquidity would eventually starve demand.

Trading migrated instead. Atomic swaps, decentralized routes and peer-to-peer venues absorbed the flow, while the float sitting on centralized order books thinned out year after year. A thin float meeting steady demand produces both halves of what the chart showed on Monday: the near-vertical advance since mid-August, and the speed with which $35 came off the price once buyers stepped back. Shallow books cut in both directions.

The daily candle left a long wick where the buyers ran out

On Kraken the session opened at $486.69, reached $548 and traded at $524 by late afternoon, a 7.93% gain that sits roughly $24 below where the move peaked. That shape, a long upper wick with a much smaller body, records an attempt at higher prices that failed to hold within the same session. It does not invalidate the trend. It does mark $548 as a level the market has now tested and rejected once.

The moving averages remain arranged in the order that signals a genuine trend rather than a bounce: the 20-day at $433, the 50-day at $386 and the 200-day at $359, short-term above medium-term above long-term. The 20-day crossed above both slower lines in mid-August and the 50-day has since turned up steeply. Only the 200-day stays close to flat, which is normal this early in a reversal.

Momentum has not cooled with the pullback. RSI reads 82.93 against its signal line at 70.72, the highest level anywhere in the visible four months and the widest gap between the two. A figure in the low eighties means buyers have met almost no resistance for days on end, and the wick that took $34 off the high did not change that. Readings this stretched can hold for weeks inside a real trend, so this is not a reason to expect a top. It does mean any further advance starts from a position that leaves little room for error.

Price trades roughly 21% above its 20-day average and about 46% above its 200-day. That gap closes one of two ways: either price falls back toward the averages, or it drifts sideways long enough for the averages to climb into it. Neither is a prediction. It is what the arithmetic of a moving average requires, and Monday’s reversal is the sort of move that starts the first process.

Above $548 the chart still contains no information at all

Nothing has traded in the $550 to $600 region on this timeframe, so there is no prior structure for participants to anchor to. Monday’s high is now the only reference point overhead, which makes it the level that defines whether the August advance continues or turns into a range.

Holding above $475 keeps Monday’s reversal in the category of ordinary profit-taking. A daily close below $433 would be the first concrete evidence that the August advance is unwinding rather than pausing.

The September date that decides how much of this premium survives

The activation window closes in early to mid-September, and the outcome is procedural rather than technical. Whether XMR swaps go live on schedule, slip again or arrive with restrictions determines how much of the current price is backed by anything usable. A second delay would leave the rally resting on a feature that has been two weeks away for a month.

Monday’s $231 million in volume already sits below the peak reached during the breakout, and a second attempt at $548 on lower volume than the first would be a poor sign. Rallies into a previously rejected level usually need more participation than the attempt that failed, not less.

Looking past September, the more consequential question is whether other decentralized liquidity protocols follow THORChain into supporting XMR natively. Monero’s constraint was never demand. It was the number of doors into the asset, and each protocol that opens one shifts the supply dynamics more durably than any single week of price action.