Is someone crowdfunding a Monero ad in India’s economic newspaper?

Monero (XMR) is the leading privacy cryptocurrency with an enthusiastic community of supporters constantly promoting its characteristics as digital cash. Nevertheless, Monero is also a controversial form of money in the highly-regulated traditional finance.

Interestingly, a Monero ad could be circulating in India’s traditional English newspaper: The Economic Times. The pseudonymous Stoic, author of “The Monero Standard,” shared a picture of the newspaper’s November 16th edition. In the picture, it is possible to see the paper’s opened front page with a large ad about XMR.

“Monero transactions respect your privacy. Can you say that about the INDIAN RUPEE or the U.S. DOLLAR?”

Moreover, the image also includes a QR-Code for donations in “XMR only,” which suggests its owner is expecting to crowdfund what was spent for this supposed insertion.

Monero vs. the Indian Rupee

In the meantime, Monero is trading at ₹16,000 against the Indian Rupee (INR) on BitBNS, by press time. Notably, XMR has registered 216% gains over the INR since April 2020’s price of ₹5,050 per coin.

As for the yearly results, Monero is up more than 35% against the INR in the last 365 days. Which is higher than its 20% 1-year performance against the U.S. Dollar (USD), from $132.23 to $159.64 per coin at the time of publication.

This divergence is a reflection of the Indian Rupee’s poor performance against the USD. Essentially, INR has been losing its value in the forex market as the economic situation worsened in the country.

Additionally, cryptocurrency adoption in India is among the biggest in the world, with growing concerns of the population related to their legal tender currency. People in India have also shown concerns about the central bank’s intentions to launch a final version of its CBDC. On that, Monero is one of ChatGPT’s top picks of cryptocurrencies to use as cash, as opposed to CBDCs.