We’re starting a new feature on the site, called “Coin of the Week.” Each week, we’ll take an in-depth look at a coin that you may not know about. This week, we’re studying Monero.
Monero
Monero is just about three years old – so it’s not brand-new, but it’s not ancient, either. Right off the bat, Monero wants you to know what it stands for, and you can see that plain as day on the front of the website: “Secure, Private, Untraceable.”
Beyond those three words, the other big thing about Monero is that it’s not based on Bitcoin’s code.
Security, Privacy, and…
Monero says its privacy protocol is based on a “cryptographically sound system that allows you to send and receive funds without your transaction being publicly visible on the blockchain.”
Their peer-to-peer consensus network keeps things secure, and their use of “ring signatures” keeps things, according to their own webpage, “untraceable.”
More Basics
As of this writing, Monero has a market cap of around $341m, and its supply is just north of 14 million units. The plan is for the emission curve to issue a total of 18.4 million coins in its first six years, then leveling off to an annual inflation rate of less than one percent per year, with no cap on number of coins.
Its current market cap ranks it as 4th largest in the world, with exponential growth during 2016 – thanks in part to its adoption by darknet markets during the past year.
Trading and Investing
Trading under the symbol XMR, the chatter around Monero over the past couple weeks centers around “FOMO” – whether or not the big, recent highs are driving investors into the platform just because Monero might be the next big thing.
XMR is traded as a pair with the US Dollar (USDT) on Poloniex.
*All stats current as of March 19, 2017.
[…] (Kraken appears to have added trading in Monero recently; you can read more about Monero, or XMR, elsewhere on this site.) Other sites have margin accounts available – but sites, as you’d imagine, are […]