Exchange Monero (XMR)

Monero is a decentralized cryptocurrency that uses a decentralized ledger along with privacy-enhancing technologies to offer anonymous, untraceable, and fungible transactions. The project is mainly focused on privacy and provides users with full control over their own finances. It solves the issues common with the other currencies that sometimes make it possible for the third parties to trace the transactions, so the identities of the sender and receiver might get compromised. 

Monero blockchain was launched in 2014 to solve this issue and obscure senders, recipients, and the number of transactions through the use of advanced cryptography. The idea is to provide privacy and security for all the users no matter how technically competent they are. The other goal of the creators was to develop an efficient and easy-to-use cryptocurrency. 

Seven developers were working on developing the network, but 5 of them never revealed their real identities. There was gossip in the community that Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin was involved in the development of Monero. It is only known that the network was forked from another privacy-focused and decentralized cryptocurrency Bytecoin by the user known under the nickname thankful_for_today. Later on, he suggested some changes that were not accepted by the community, and from that time the project was led by a Core Team, which is responsible for Monero's development until now. 

Since 2014 Monero has undergone several changes and updates. In particular, it was migrated to another database structure and a minimum size of the ring signatures was set, making all the transactions secure by default. By today more than 500 developers contributed to Monero. 

The project uses a unique consensus mechanism called CryptoNight. It’s based on the proof-of-work algorithm and prevents big mining farms from dominating the network. 

The utilization of three technologies makes Monero secure: Stealth Addresses, Ring Signatures, and RingCT. The blockchain securely records transactions. The copy of the blockchain is maintained by the members of the Monero network. It eliminates the need for a central authority. The transactions are only seen by the sender and recipient, no one else can get access to this private data. Moreover, all the Monero tokens are fungible, which makes them impossible to be tracked. 

Thanks to the Ring Signatures, the past transaction outputs are picked from the blockchain and act as a decoy, making it impossible for the outside observers to tell who signed it. Any amount sent is split into random chunks. Stealth Addresses are created for every new transaction and used only once, thus securing the receiver. Because of the advanced security, Monero is used a lot for illicit transactions on the darknet markets. 

XMR is the native token of Monero that was designed to be resistant to the application-specific integrated circuits, thus making it possible to mine the XMR coins with the average computer equipment. The total supply is meant to reach 18.4 million XMR tokens by May 31, 2022. After that small amounts of Monero coins will be released into the system every minute as rewards.