Certainly the incremental costs of effective laundering (were there such a thing) are an incentive to use XMR instead.  But usually the margins on these things are high enough so that it's almost noise.

In other news, I assume everyone has noticed the 500 BTC (and growing) added to the bid book recently.  Also I notice an occasional ephemeral ~200BTC bid wall.  So much heat, so little light!  Nothing happens because no one is selling.  Lots of liquidity, but not enough price discovery.  Fear is the mind killer.  Maybe this will be a "buy the news" event, after all.  It will remove doubt, when it is accomplished.

Now 36k offered on the ask side.  A response to the whale song from the bid side?  If you assume that any book-sweep will be followed by a support vacuum, it might make sense to short a gob at some reasonably high quote.  That strategy offered some good gains last night, maybe as much as 800bp on the trade if you timed it very nicely.

But no, it appears to be functioning as a scare wall.