.png){kind=logo}
Disclaimer: We're not offering any investment advice – the entire material is intended for general informational purposes. Please note that cryptocurrency is a highly volatile asset, and investing in it entails risks. A huge one, perhaps. Always do your research and play smart.
Monero is the world's first cryptocurrency designed to provide complete privacy, and that remains its core mission today. Launched in 2014, it is built on the CryptoNote protocol, which introduced deep anonymity with Bytecoin.
Monero was initially developed as a privacy-focused alternative to Bitcoin. traceable
From a purely technical perspective, Monero operates on the Proof-of-Work algorithm, similar to Bitcoin. This distinguishes it from many modern blockchains that have switched to Proof-of-Stake instead.
What makes Monero truly special is its community-driven development: unlike many other projects, Monero thrives thanks to the hard work of its dedicated enthusiasts and supporters. Indeed, the developers are still here, yet the amount of effort the community is putting into the project is genuinely overwhelming.
If you're familiar with the coin and want to buy it, you can use an exchange or trading platform to make the process quick and easy. Xgram is a great option, offering low commissions and fast transactions – you get what you need without the hassle. For example, you can swap LTC to XMR here. This pair is one of the most popular, but Xgram.io supports over 20 others, too – no matter which asset you want to trade for XMR, you'll have no trouble finding a match.
Monero offers a high level of privacy, as it can conceal the sender, recipient, and transaction amount. It uses advanced cryptography to make transactions entirely invisible to outsiders. One of Monero's key privacy tools is ring signatures, which mix the sender's transaction with others. This creates a problem because it's difficult to determine who initiated the payment. Like, hard.
To keep things safe even more, Monero uses so-called 'stealth addresses' – unique, one-time addresses created for each transaction. And if that were all, there's also RingCT, which hides the amount being sent, providing an extra layer of privacy: only the sender and receiver know the exact details, while everyone else sees encrypted data.
By the way, Monero has a nifty trick up its sleeve: its seed phrase (the set of words used to restore access to the wallet) isn't just simplified to some English words. Unlike many other cryptocurrencies, Monero can generate seed phrases in multiple languages.
Monero, as a privacy-based currency, is designed to be really hard to trace.
But nothing's impossible.
CipherTrace, a company that analyzes transactions, developed a tool to track XMR transaction flows at the request of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Now, the system is used in criminal investigations, mainly to track stolen coins used for illegal transactions.
And, well, there's no doubt that CipherTrace's solution does the job. Yet for scammers, it's bad news: they'll spend lots of time trying to find or trace anything in Monero.
Like any similar project, Monero has had its ups and downs. Let's also talk about some of the vulnerabilities it has faced.
Before February 2017, Monero's system allowed users to turn off privacy protections and spend coins without any mix-ins (obfuscation layers). Approximately 64% of all transactions during that time were conducted without mixing, meaning they had no privacy protection whatsoever.
But here's the catch: 64% of coins can be mixed with other transactions later on, which also helps in tracing the remaining 36%.
The good news is... Monero's developers have been working diligently to enhance the protocol and make it more difficult to identify real transactions. The detection rate dropped over the years, reaching just 20% by April 15 of the same 2017 year.
That's a huge step forward. Not a single doubt. Today, estimates suggest the rate ranges from 3% to 13%.
The work, on the other sides, is just as intensive. For the system, constant updates and improvements in both privacy and security are the norm. For example, developers regularly audit the codebase, which many others don't.
It's as simple as that.
XMR is one of the most secure and private cryptocurrencies, making it ideal for those who value privacy. It utilizes ring signatures, confidential addresses, and the Dandelion++ protocol to make tracing extremely difficult.
Nevertheless, it isn't completely untraceable or immune to all kinds of attacks.
Speaking frankly and openly, it's doubtful that such unbreakable solutions exist at all. The only thing that seems realistic is the possibility of simply providing a decent level of protection, as conditional hackers will devise new ways of circumvention every day, and the task of developers is to devise countermeasures.
So far, Monero's creators are doing a commendable job. And the community keeps up with them just as well, sometimes even better.
