Monero was launched in 2014, and its goal is simple: to allow transactions to take place privately and with anonymity. Even though it’s commonly thought that BTC can conceal a person’s identity, it’s often easy to trace payments back to their original source because blockchains are transparent. On the other hand, XMR is designed to obscure senders and recipients alike through the use of advanced cryptography.

The team behind Monero say privacy and security are their biggest priorities, with ease of use and efficiency coming second. It aims to provide protection to all users — irrespective of how technologically competent they are.

Overall, XMR aims to allow payments to be made quickly and inexpensively without fear of censorship.

Seven developers were initially involved in creating Monero — five of whom decided to remain anonymous. There have been rumors that XMR was also invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin.

XMR’s origins can be traced back to Bytecoin, a privacy-focused and decentralized cryptocurrency that was launched in 2012. Two years later, a member of the Bitcointalk forum — only known as thankfulfortoday — forked BCN’s codebase, and Monero was born. They had suggested “controversial changes” to Bytecoin that others in the community disagreed with and decided to take matters into their own hands.

It’s believed that hundreds of developers have contributed to XMR over the years. Monero uses a Proof-of-Work algorithm, RandomX, to validate transactions. The method was introduced in November 2019 to replace the former algorithm CryptoNightR. Both were designed to be ASIC-resistant.

Monero can be mined somewhat efficiently on consumer-grade hardware, such as x86, x86-64, ARM and GPUs, a design decision that was based on Monero's opposition to mining centralization that ASIC mining creates. However, it has also resulted in Monero's popularity among malware-based non-consensual miners.

In October of 2021, the Monero project introduced P2Pool, a mining pool running on a sidechain that gives participants full control of their node as with solo mining configurations. There are several things that make Monero unique. One of the project’s biggest aims is achieving the greatest level of decentralization possible, meaning that a user doesn’t need to trust anyone else on the network.

Privacy is achieved through a few distinctive features. Whereas each Bitcoin in circulation has its own serial number, meaning that cryptocurrency usage can be monitored, XMR is completely fungible. By default, details about senders, recipients and the amount of crypto being transferred are obscured — and Monero advocates says this offers an upper hand over rival privacy coins such as Zcash, which are “selectively transparent.”

Obfuscation is achieved through the use of ring signatures. Here, past transaction outputs are picked from the blockchain and act as decoys, meaning that outside observers can’t tell who signed it. If Ian was sending 200 XMR to Susan, this amount could also be split into random chunks to add a further level of difficulty.

To ensure that transactions cannot be linked to one another, stealth addresses are created for every single transaction that are only used once.

All of these distinctive features have led to XMR being increasingly used for illicit transactions instead of Bitcoin — especially on darknet markets. Governments around the world, especially the U.S., have also offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who can crack Monero’s code.