Monero Price

About monero (XMR)

What is monero?

Monero (XMR) is a cryptocurrency famous for its privacy and security features. This token uses privacy protocols to obfuscate user transactions. Unlike other tokens, the public doesn’t have access to user addresses, transaction records, and address balances. 

Monero is built atop CryptoNote, an application layer protocol conceptualized and developed in 2013 to solve specific problems identified on the Bitcoin blockchain. CryptoNote’s whitepaper was authored by an individual named Nicolas van Saberhagen. This is presumably a pseudonym because nothing is known about the original whitepaper’s author.

Monero has found favor with privacy-conscious individuals around the world. It has also drawn scrutiny from government agencies alleging that the token facilitates money laundering and fraud. For instance, the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) once offered a $625,000 bounty to anyone who cracks Monero’s privacy.

History of Monero

Monero’s origins began with the CryptoNote protocol published in 2013. A pseudonymous person conceptualized this protocol to solve certain problems they identified with Bitcoin, including privacy, transaction traceability, and bulky scripts.

Monero was launched in April 2014 by a team of seven developers. It was a fork of an earlier coin called BitMonero. Most of its developers chose to remain anonymous, but two of them, Riccardo Spagni and David Latapie, became the public face. Spagni resigned from the Monero team in 2019. Shortly after, he was charged with over 300 counts of fraud and forgery for allegedly stealing money from his former employer while based in South Africa. Spagni was arrested by U.S. authorities in Tennessee, and the South African government sought his extradition. Rumors have swirled that Spagni is an informant to law enforcement, but he has repeatedly denied the accusation. He remains on bail in the U.S. amid legal disputes. 

XMR has been maintained by its core team following Spagni’s resignation, although most of them remain anonymous. It is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies owing to its solid privacy and security features. As of December 22, 2024, XMR has a market value of $3,555,796,740. The current XMR price hovers around $192.81.

How Monero works

Monero doesn’t have a maximum supply, unlike many other cryptocurrencies. Instead, it has a fixed emission rate to keep supply in check. Miners could emit 0.6 XMR per minute until monero hit a total supply of 18 million. It hit that figure in 2022, and the emission rate halved to 0.3 XMR per minute. This rate will halve every four years at the current mining pace. The more XMRs get mined, the harder it becomes to mine new ones, which helps keep the monero price in check.

Monero achieves privacy for users. You can transact with it, and no one can trace your transactions on a public ledger, unlike other cryptocurrencies. The core mechanism for obscuring transactions is a ring signature, a digital signature from a group of users with their respective private keys. For privacy reasons, no one can determine exactly whose keys were used to sign the transaction. Monero also uses stealth addresses that no one can link to the sender or receiver.

Founders of Monero

Monero’s founding team is made up of seven people. Only two of them are publicly known, Riccardo Spagni and David Latapie. Spagni has resigned to face other issues, but Latapie remains a core developer and heads Monero’s European team. He has given several interviews and talks about the cryptocurrency.

Other Monero founders apart from Spagni and Latapie are only known by their pseudonyms. They used pet names like Taco Time, eizh, othe, NoodleDoodle, smooth, and thankful_for_today. 

Monero has also drawn interest from several developers that continue to contribute to its code. They include Francisco Cabañas, who designed the coin’s dynamic fee structure; Seth For Privacy, a privacy activist and podcast host; and Justin Ehrenhofer, an executive at Cake Wallet.

Monero privacy features

Monero is famous for its privacy features. Many people use it because it guarantees their privacy and security. You can send XMR tokens to others or receive XMR tokens without a trace. There’s a public ledger for Monero transactions, similar to other tokens, but all the details are obfuscated through ring signatures. These features have given Monero a loyal following among privacy-conscious crypto enthusiasts, which has led to a relatively high XMR price.

Monero unique aspects

Sender privacy: ring signatures

A ring signature in cryptography refers to a digital signature that can come from any member of a set of users, each having encryption keys. Imagine having a group of 100 wallets to sign a transaction. The signature for a transaction can come from any of these random wallets. When a random wallet signs the transaction, it is virtually impossible for an outsider to determine which one exactly signed it. This is an illustration of how Monero hides transactions.

Whenever you send XMR tokens, different digital signatures combine into one “ring” signature and prevent any outside party from linking that signature to a specific transaction.

Receiver privacy: stealth addresses

Stealth addresses are one-time random wallet addresses that facilitate a transaction. A monero recipient can reveal their public address, and the sender can create a unique stealth address that only they and the receiver know. The sender can then transfer the tokens to that stealth address where the recipient will access them. 

Confidential transactions: RingCT

Alongside ring signatures and stealth addresses, Monero also uses Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) to obfuscate transaction amounts from third parties. Only the sender and receiver can know the details of a transaction, including the monero crypto price and value at the time.

Monero circulating supply

The current price of monero is $192.81. It has a circulating supply of $18,446,744 tokens, giving the token a market value of $3,555,796,740. As we explained earlier, monero does not have a hard limit on its circulating supply like other tokens, e.g., bitcoin. Instead, supply is controlled by an emission rate, i.e., how fast new coins can be mined.

Monero began with an emission rate of 0.6 XMR per minute. This figure implies that miners could not get above 0.6 XMR per minute, no matter how powerful their computers are. The emission rate halved in May 2022 when XMR hit a total supply of 18.1 million tokens. This figure implies it’s now twice as hard to mine XMR as before.

The emission rate keeps monero’s supply in check and ensures that the XMR price has low volatility.

Security measures for the Monero network

Though Monero has solid security features, you should take extra caution to avoid potential hacks or theft.

• Always transact with a secure device and avoid connecting to public Wi-Fi because they’re usually unsafe.

• Keep the keys to your wallet in a very safe place. If you lose your keys, you might not be able to recover your tokens.

• Change your wallet passwords regularly.

Where to buy monero (XMR)

You can buy XMR tokens on any reputable crypto exchange or wallet app. Your app should show you the XMR price, and you can select how many tokens you want to purchase. You’ll pay a transaction fee to the exchange or wallet provider to cover their costs.

You can buy monero at popular centralized crypto exchanges like Binance and Kraken or decentralized exchanges like Bisq. Some exchanges disable monero in specific jurisdictions, e.g., the US, due to regulations and legal pressure.

Mining monero

Monero is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency. It uses a specific algorithm developed by the Monero community called RandomX. RandomX is optimized for general-purpose CPUs and is ASIC-resistant. This means that it is impossible to use specialized computers to mine monero; you must use consumer-grade hardware so all miners are on relatively equal footing. 
You can mine tokens solo or join a mining pool. Solo mining is more secure than mining in a pool, and you can mine tokens directly from your monero wallet. Pool mining gives you more frequent payouts according to the pool you’re participating in, but you’ll have to pay the pool operator a fee.

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