Blockchain investigator ZachXBT reported that approximately 3,520 BTC (~$330M) were transferred from a suspicious address, coinciding with sharp Monero (XMR) price surges.

According to his post, the stolen funds began to be laundered through six or more instant swap exchanges.

As of this writing, no public disclosure of a specific hacked entity has been made.

XMR-USD

The Timeline of XMR-USD Events

(All times are Eastern Time, New York)

  • ~6:00 PM, April 27 (Sunday) — Initial Monero buying begins; volume starts increasing steadily.
  • ~9:25 PM, April 27 — XMR peaks at $303.23 after a gap jump, with peak dollar volume reaching $19.9M.
  • ~11:15 PM, April 27 — XMR drifts lower to $258.13, with significantly reduced trading volume.
  • ~1:50 AM, April 28 (Monday) — Price surges to a high of $339.19. The move involves eight rounds of violent upward and downward swings, with each push accompanied by $10M–$20M in dollar volume.
  • ~5:10 AM, April 28 — The majority of large whale-driven trading ends; the price drifts down to $261.81.
  • ~5:10 PM, April 28 — The session low is recorded at $250.59.
  • ~7:31 AM, April 29 — XMR drifts higher toward the $270s with significantly lower trading volume.

While total observed trading volume during the XMR spikes exceeded $120M, estimates of net laundering activity suggest approximately $50M worth of Bitcoin was converted during the active window.

🧱 Realistic Analysis of Timing and Liquidity

Weekend liquidity is always lower — but that's a double-edged sword

  • Market makers and OTC desks are mostly offline Friday night to Sunday night.
  • Order books are thinner.
  • Slippage is worse.
  • The small laundering operations pays heavy price premiums. In this case, the bad actors accepted 30%–40% effective loss to achieve fast laundering.

The massive Monero spikes (~$220 → ~$339) almost certainly triggered automated tracking (whale bots, security firms, alert systems). Their urgency outweighed their stealth — they tried to race against the clock but sacrificed stealth by causing huge market waves.

🎯 Strategic Conclusion

✅ Their operational goal was clear: "Finish laundering by early Monday before compliance desks activate."
✅ But their execution quality was poor, and they overpaid massively (likely 30%–40%) for privacy.

Monero’s Privacy Mechanisms

Monero was engineered from its inception to achieve strong on-chain privacy through multiple integrated technologies:

  • Ring Signatures: Hide the sender by mixing each transaction input with multiple decoys.
  • Stealth Addresses: Generate one-time destination addresses for each transaction, protecting the receiver’s identity.
  • Confidential Transactions (RingCT): Conceal transaction amounts, preventing external observers from inferring transaction details.
  • Dandelion++: Obfuscate network-level metadata such as IP addresses during transaction propagation.

Unlike other chains where privacy must be consciously enabled or externally added, Monero applies privacy protections by default at the protocol level.

From a purely technical standpoint, Monero consistently fulfills its stated design goal:

  • Enabling private, untraceable, and unlinkable transactions on a public ledger.
  • Chain analysis techniques that work against Bitcoin or Ethereum are ineffective against Monero’s design.
  • Transaction flows, participant addresses, and transferred amounts are fundamentally shielded from public scrutiny.
  • Privacy is enforced at both the ledger and network communication layers.

Forensic investigation of the address bc1qcrypchnrdx87jnal5e5m849fw460t4gk7vz55g

  • Address type Bech32 (P2WPKH) — standard Bitcoin SegWit address
  • Balance now Basically empty — only 0.00000846 BTC (~$0.80) left
  • Total received 7017.53874053 BTC (~$667M)
  • Total sent 7017.53873207 BTC (~$667M)
  • Transactions 8 transactions total

✅ This address handled enormous sums in a very short time, and then was fully drained.

Transaction timeline

4/27/2025 ~17:01–17:15 (New York Time)

Received large deposits:

  • 70 BTC (~$6.7M)
  • 3,450 BTC (~$327M) (→ total ~3,520 BTC — matches ZachXBT post.)

4/27/2025 ~17:11–17:37

Started draining the address:

  • Sent ~63 BTC
  • Sent ~310 BTC
  • Sent ~2789 BTC
  • Sent ~357 BTC

4/28/2025 ~04:26 AM

Minor dust transaction (insignificant).

✅ Right after receiving 3,520 BTC, the hacker broke it apart and flushed out to multiple addresses.

Timing exactly matches Monero spike beginning (~6PM NYT Sunday → early Monday).

Final Note

Further developments, including forensic reports or exchange investigations, may refine our understanding of this event over time.