Over the past year, the privacy-focused cryptocurrency monero has grown by more than 3,000%, and in recent weeks soared to new heights, trading above $330 for the first time amid promises by its developers of lower transaction fees.

The price surge, which echoes the recent explosion in bitcoin’s value, also coincides with another trend: hackers are quietly hijacking significant numbers of computers to run code that mines the currency. In recent months, crypto-jacking malware has reportedly been secretly mining monero as people watched videos on websites owned by Showtime and Ultimate Fighting Challenge and as customers at Starbucks cafes in Argentina used Wi-Fi. According to Reuters, the Russian pipeline giant Transneft said last week that it had discovered software surreptitiously mining the cryptocurrency on some of its computers. “It could have a negative impact on the productivity of our processing capacity,” Transneft vice-president Vladimir Rushailo reportedly told company executives.

The three-year-old currency’s privacy-focused design has also made it handy for darknet drug deals and money laundering. In September the Milan-based security firm Neutrino reported that someone had moved payouts that had been collected in May’s widespread WannaCry ransomware attack from bitcoin to monero, which is presumably easier to surreptitiously convert into fiat currency. (In June, a leaked NSA memo linked the WannaCry worm to North Korea.)

Still, monero’s developers are hoping that the currency’s ease of mining and privacy features—the very features that make it so appealing to hackers and criminals—can help it baby-step into the mainstream. They’ve enlisted some star power too: Earlier this month, the monero team announced a partnership that lets people spend the cryptocurrency at official online stores for big-name musicians like Dolly Parton, Weezer, Mariah Carey, and the Backstreet Boys. Dubbed Project Coral Reef, the initiative offers discounts when buying music or merchandise from some of the 35 participating artists using monero.

“Project Coral Reef is a very important step towards the mainstream adoption of monero,” Riccardo “fluffypony” Spagni, the currency’s core developer and lead maintainer, said in a statement.

Spagni, who is based in South Africa, is also the founder of Globee, a cryptocurrency payment processor that’s involved in Coral Reef. He launched the music-merch project with Naveen Jain, a Bay Area entrepreneur who’s also the founder of Clique Here, an entertainment marketing firm that works with some of the artists participating in the partnership, and digital creative agency Sparkart.

As with most cryptocurrencies, monero transactions are recorded in a shared, cryptographically verified ledger known as a blockchain, using numeric addresses that have no meaning in the outside world. But unlike bitcoin, where it’s possible to monitor the flow of currency from address to address and therefore infer connections between users, monero uses additional cryptographic techniques to obscure who’s sending how much money to whom.