Monero (XMR)

Monero: a closer look

What Monero is

Monero (XMR) came out in April 2014 as a fork of Bytecoin on the CryptoNote protocol, and the whole design is built around confidentiality. There is no company behind the project: it is run by an open community, and there was no pre-mine.

How Monero works

Everything is hidden at once, with no settings to turn on: ring signatures mix decoys in with the real sender, stealth addresses generate a one-time destination address for each payment, and RingCT hides the amount. The coin is mined with the RandomX algorithm — designed for ordinary processors — and a block comes out roughly every 2 minutes. When the main issuance ends, miners will be left with a constant small reward: 0.6 XMR per block.

What Monero is for

People turn to Monero when payments and holdings should not be on public display: otherwise anyone who knows the address sees both the balance and the whole history of operations. Coins in the blockchain are indistinguishable from one another, so XMR is fully fungible.

Sending XMR

A main address starts with 4, a subaddress with 8, and both are noticeably longer than bitcoin ones. Incoming funds can be spent after 10 confirmations — about 20 minutes. The fee is low and does not depend on the amount sent.

Where to keep Monero

Use the official or long-established Monero wallets — desktop and mobile; some hardware devices work with XMR too. Keep the 25-word seed phrase offline.

What to keep in mind

Regulators are pushing, and XMR is not traded on many large exchanges — liquidity is pulled towards a few venues. The price, as with any coin, swings.