What is Monero?

For the true coin connoisseurs, Monero always was and will remain one of the most private cryptocurrencies on the internet. However, it has a special place in the hearts of actual crypto OGs, being part of the Anonymity Enhanced Cryptocurrencies (AECs).

Monero Blockchain is one of the most important blockchains in the wild. It has achieved a high level of popularity due to its privacy-oriented features. Monero is the first blockchain created with privacy, security, and decentralization in mind above all other characteristics.

• Blockchain technology — which forms the underlying databases behind digital cryptocurrencies — builds an architecture of public ledgers of participants’ activities that show all the transactions on the network.

The most important points about Monero

This ecosystem is different. Monero Blockchain is intentionally configured to be opaque and to make transaction details anonymous by disguising the addresses used by participants. That way, it hides information like the identity of the sender and recipient or the amount of the transactions.

How does it work

Monero supports a mining process where individuals get rewarded by mining on their own or joining mining pools. In addition, XMR can be mined on a standard computer without specific mining hardware.

Characteristics of Monero

Privacy is the most important characteristic of this blockchain. It integrates Ring signatures and Stealth addresses. Ring signatures enable a sending participant to conceal his identity from other participants. The signatures are anonymous digital signatures from one group member.

• To generate a ring signature, the Monero blockchain uses a combination of a sender’s account keys and pairs it with public keys on the blockchain, which makes it unique and private.

This function enables the ability to hide the sender’s identity — as it is computationally impossible to ascertain which of a group member’s keys was used to produce the complex signature.

What is Monero used for

The non-traceable transaction history functions offer participants a much safer network where they do not risk having their funds frozen, confiscated, or their transactions blocked by others.

Another advantage of Monero is its fungibility. This means that two units of a currency can mutually be substituted, and there is no difference between the two. This is a significant difference between the Bitcoin blockchain and the Monero blockchain. Monero is fungible, while each Bitcoin unit is non-fungible as each can be traced back to its origins. Bitcoin’s blockchain allows identifying Bitcoin units that may have been linked to specific events like fraud, gambling, or theft — which paves the way for blocking, suspending, or closing accounts holding such units.

Monero’s history is not short of challenges. While these privacy advantages have fueled the rapid adoption of Monero and XMR, the non-traceability and privacy features of the blockchain allow them to be used for nefarious purposes and in questionable market places — including drugs and gambling markets on the dark web.

Genesis and XMR coin

2014 was the year when Monero XMR was officially released — with an excellent welcome from the development community, privacy advocates, and the cypherpunks OGs. Since then, it has had many obstacles, most set up by the authorities and institutions that arguably do not want complete anonymity on the internet’s decentralized financial world (DeFi).

Even some major cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase stopped offering Monero transactions at times, while U.S. regulators have taken notice of the privacy-based cryptocurrency and tried different ways to tackle the situation.

The founders and the community

Monero’s first seed idea can be traced back to CryptoNote — a cryptocurrency protocol — published by Nicolas van Saberhagen in October 2013. The protocol is open source. The cryptography community used this concept to design Monero and deployed its mainnet in 2014. However, much of the core development team chooses to remain anonymous.

• Monero translates to coin in Esperanto.

Monero has a vast developer community, and most supporters are OGs in the crypto space. In addition, its privacy features have attracted cypherpunks and users desiring privacy measures not provided in other cryptocurrencies.

Why does it matter

The bottom line is that Monero XMR has existed for almost ten years and is not going anywhere soon. The reason for being privacy-focused is explained on Monero’s website:

Monero takes privacy seriously. Monero needs to be able to protect users in a court of law and, in extreme cases, from the death penalty. This level of privacy must be completely accessible to all users, whether they are technologically competent or have no idea how Monero works. A user needs to confidently trust Monero in a way that this person does not feel pressured into changing their spending habits for the risk of others finding out.

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