What is Monero (XMR)?

Private, secure, and untraceable: Discover Monero (XMR)

August 8, 20255 mins Read

The profound impact brought about by the birth of Bitcoin in 2009 is undeniable. The creation of a decentralized currency – disconnected from nation states, with a predictable protocol for issuing new coins, and auditable and open to all – ushered in a new way of holding money: an asset for transferring and storing value and purchasing power.

However, Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, fell victim to this structural flaw in its architecture: public and traceable wallet addresses and transaction values, which, in short, led to a lack of native privacy on the network.

In 2014, Monero (XMR) was born as an open-source and decentralized blockchain protocol, focusing on private and untraceable payments natively embedded. Within its ecosystem, the implementation of ring signatures, stealth addresses, and RingCT stand out as technologies that guarantee the anonymity of the sender, recipient, and the value of a transaction.

The history of Monero (XMR)

Monero emerged in April 2014 as a fork of the Bytecoin cryptocurrency, created within the scope of CryptoNote and developed with the intention of overcoming technical flaws in Bitcoin, including the lack of protection of the metadata and overall privacy of crypto transactions. [1]

What is metadata?

Since its inception, it has been characterized by the anonymity of its founders, who, like Satoshi Nakamoto of Bitcoin, remain under pseudonyms. Its main creator goes by the name thankful_for_today, but the Monero community quickly replaced him with a more active and transparent group of developers, given the implementation of decentralized governance within the community.

It is also worth noting that, when Monero was created, there was no pre-mining, a process that would have benefited the founders and developers behind the project. This prevented the concentration of tokens in the hands of a few and the effects this could have on market prices and the future of the project.

Also, throughout the project, several variations of the encryption algorithm were applied in order to avoid the centralisation of mining in large mining farms. To this day it is possible and common to mine XMR with ordinary CPUs on mining pools.

Thus, with the growing awareness of the privacy limitations of Bitcoin and other crypto projects, Monero stands out today for its robust privacy proposal and commitment to decentralization. Even under intense regulatory pressure and technical challenges, Monero remains one of the leading privacy-focused currencies, with ample liquidity and popularity.

Monero (XMR) vs. Bitcoin (BTC)

Feature	Bitcoin (BTC)	Monero (XMR)
Design objective	Decentralized store of value	Currency for private, anonymous, and censorship-resistant payments
Hash algorithm	SHA-256 — computationally intensive, favors ASICs	RandomX — optimized for CPUs, ASIC-resistant
Block time	~10 minutes	~2 minutes
Coin emission	Halving every 210,000 blocks	Smooth emission with perpetual tail emission (0.6 XMR per block)
Maximum supply	21 million coins	No fixed cap; continuous tail emission to incentivize miners indefinitely
Network architecture	Peer-to-peer	Peer-to-peer
Mining	Highly centralized in large ASIC mining farms	Accessible to anyone with a CPU; resistant to centralization
Native privacy	Absent — all transactions are public and traceable	Built-in by default — sender, receiver, and transaction amount are all obfuscated

Understanding the Monero ecosystem

The Monero ecosystem is supported by sophisticated technologies that ensure the privacy and security of your transactions. Below are three of the main innovations responsible for this protection:

Stealth Addresses

Every time someone sends Monero, the protocol automatically generates a unique and disposable address for that transaction. This means that even if multiple transactions are made to the same user, they appear on the blockchain as if they were to different recipients. The goal is to prevent the public connection between a user's address and the funds they receive. [2]

Ring Signatures

This technology mixes the input of a transaction with several other previous transactions from the blockchain. With a transaction having multiple signatures, the effect is that, when looking at the blockchain, it is not possible to identify which of the multiple signatures is the true origin of the transaction. The aim is to protect the sender's identity by obscuring it within a group of possible senders. [3]

Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT)

Introduced in 2017, this technique hides the transaction value. Although the transaction can be validated by all nodes in the network, the exact value is not publicly disclosed. This ensures complete confidentiality of the amounts transferred, without compromising the verifiability and integrity of the system. [4]

In addition, Monero employs the RandomX algorithm, designed specifically to make mining resistant to ASICs. This is common in cryptocurrency mining farms that currently dominate the mining market, such as in Bitcoin. It allows anyone with a home computer (CPU) to actively contribute to the network, ensuring decentralized and democratic mining.

Conclusion

Monero, which comes from the Esperanto word for “money,” is a digital currency in Web3 strongly committed to the autonomy and privacy of its users. With an engaged and open community, the project stands out for its resilience to centralization, whether in the mining process, in the absence of coin control in the hands of the founders, or in its distributed governance.

Finally, its commitment to privacy by default, cutting-edge technologies, and a truly decentralized ethos make Monero not only a technical alternative to Bitcoin, but also an ethical statement about the right to financial anonymity in times of widespread surveillance.