The Monero Project
Monero is an open source cryptocurrency created in April 2014 that is focused on privacy, decentralisation and scalability. Monero (XMR) currently have a market capitalization of over $30 million with a value of single coin of about 2.50$ (from CoinMktCap).
Do Darknet users trust only Bitcoin?
Darknet users' main concern is to stay safe and anonymous.
Monero uses a cryptographically sound system that allows you to send and receive funds without your transactions being publicly visible on the blockchain.
By taking advantage of ring signatures, a special property of certain types of cryptography, Monero enables untraceable transactions.
Privacy and decentralization of Monero
Despite to its strength, the anonymity of transactions cannot achieved on the Bitcoin network as like as The Monero Project do.
Monero price rise in 2016
Since January/February 2016 XMR price went up by almost 500% apparently due to the born of different markets on the Darknet supporting it.
Everyone knows that the Darknet markets are one of the main application of cryptocurrencies.
Conclusion
I'm sure that more and more darknet markets will add Monero support in the future making XMR price rising over time and getting stability in its trades. This is already confirmed by a daily trade volume of more than half million dollars.
Oasis Market did not accept Monero until yesterday and Alphabay will not until September 1. There was no interest in Monero on the darknet until the SIGAINT email service on Tor started a Monero service a couple of weeks ago. That is the reason for the recent price rise, along with the announcements from Oasis and Alphabay. All of this has been well covered already on Reddit.