due to its privacy features, monero experienced rapid growth in market capitalization and transaction volume during the year 2016, faster and bigger than any other cryptocurrency that year. this growth was driven by its uptake in the darknet market, where people used it to buy stolen credit cards, guns, and drugs. two major darknet markets were shut down in july 2017 by law enforcement. from the beginning, monero has been used by people holding other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin to break the link between transactions, with the other cryptocoins first converted to monero, then after some delay converted back and sent to an address unrelated to those used before.