Are you referring to on-exchange volume of a coin that has pumped 10x in a few months? And it's only 6x the on-exchange volume of monero? It sounds like people still don't use it. If you look at the blockchain, you will see very few transactions per block (literally less than one per minute), so it seems the volume is almost entirely on the exchanges. It's probably people speculating on privacy for some reason, combined with some dumping of the pre-mine.

The majority of the on-chain use is also public transactions, so it seems the "privacy by default" setting doesn't really matter.