Monero

Monero (XMR) is a decentralized, open-source cryptocurrency designed to prioritize privacy and anonymity. It utilizes advanced cryptographic techniques to obscure transaction details, ensuring that the sender, receiver, and amount transferred remain private and untraceable.

Monero employs various privacy-enhancing features, including ring signatures, stealth addresses, and Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT). Ring signatures combine a user's transaction with others, obfuscating the real sender. Stealth addresses generate a new, one-time address for each transaction, concealing the recipient's identity. RingCT encrypts transaction amounts, making them visible only to the parties involved.

Launched in April 2014 as a fork of Bytecoin, Monero has since gained significant traction, becoming one of the largest privacy-focused cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. As of May 2023, Monero's market capitalization stood at nearly USD 2.8 billion.

Monero's mining process is designed to be ASIC-resistant, leveraging the RandomX algorithm that favors CPU mining over specialized hardware. This approach aims to promote decentralization and equitable distribution of mining rewards. The network generates a new block approximately every two minutes, with an unlimited emission to ensure continued mining incentives.