Crypto of the Week: Monero

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September 24 2021
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Monero has proved to be one of the more resilient cryptocurrencies in 2021. Here’s what you need to know about it.

While Monero isn’t necessarily one of the most-talked-about cryptocurrencies, its consistent performance in recent years suggests that it has a staying power that many other crypto assets lack.

XMR has grown in value by approximately 182 per cent over the past year, but if you’re considering adding it to your portfolio, there are a few things you should know beforehand.

What is Monero?

At the high level, Monero is a more privacy-oriented take on bitcoin.

Like bitcoin, Monero uses a proof-of-work consensus model. It’s a digital ledger that supports digital, peer-to-peer transactions made via the XMR token. This is the native cryptocurrency of the Monero blockchain network.

The end goal of Monero is to facilitate transactions that are more secure and private than that of other blockchain networks.

To that end, there are a few differences between Monero and bitcoin that potential investors will want to keep in mind.

While bitcoin has a reputation for anonymous payments, time has seen numerous cracks emerge in the myth that payments made using the cryptocurrency are untraceable. To remedy this, Monero adopts a number of measures that make transactions exponentially harder to trace, such as one-use stealth addresses.

Across the board, Monero’s take on a digital ledger is significantly more opaque than that of many other cryptocurrencies.

It isn’t the only coin focused on privacy, but it’s the most well known for one very good reason: the Ring signature. This design feature obfuscates the identity of transactions made by mixing the details among other transactions made in the same block.

Who made the Monero (XMR) crypto?

Monero is built on a forked version of another cryptocurrency called Bytecoin.

It was launched in 2014 by a small community of developers who believed that cryptocurrencies like bitcoin were falling short when it came to privacy.

Like bitcoin, the creator of Monero remains unknown. The project has no major venture capital funding and is open source.

What is the XMR token used for?

As opposed to more ambitious cryptocurrencies like ethereum, Cardano or Avalanche, Monero isn’t looking to operate as a platform for decentralised applications or anything like that. It’s entirely focused on facilitating digital, peer-to-peer transactions.

As such, the main usage of the XMR token is that of a medium of exchange on the network. It can be sent, received and held. However, there’s currently no staking mechanisms or anything like that seen in the world of decentralised finance (DeFi).

How much is the Monero (XMR) token worth?

As of the 23rd of September 2021, XMR is priced at US$247.05 per unit.

Tallied up at that price, XMR has a market cap of approximately US$4 billion.

For comparison, bitcoin (BTC) has a market cap of US$900 billion, while ether (ETH) sits in second place at US$377 billion.

Where can you buy the Monero (XMR) crypto?

The XMR token is available from most major and mainstream spot exchanges. This list currently includes:

Binance
Kraken
KuCoin
Gate.io
Bitfinex
Huobi Global
Bitconomy
OKEx

About the author

Fergus is a journalist for Momentum Media's nestegg and Smart Property Investment. He likes to write about money, markets, how innovation is changing the financial landscape and how younger consumers can achieve their goals in unpredictable times.

About the author

Fergus is a journalist for Momentum Media's nestegg and Smart Property Investment. He likes to write about money, markets, how innovation is changing the financial landscape and how younger consumers can achieve their goals in unpredictable times.

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