A privacy-focused cryptocurrency, Monero (XMR) was launched in April 2014 with the aim of facilitating private and anonymous transactions. Although Bitcoin (BTC) is widely believed to be "private", it is in fact not anonymous, and blockchain analytics firms such as Chainalysis have become adept at tracing transactions on Bitcoin and most other blockchain networks.Unlike Bitcoin, Monero is designed as a censorship-resistant cryptocurrency and claims to use advanced cryptography and various other techniques to shield the identities of XMR senders and receivers. In fact, security and privacy are two of Monero’s biggest USPs.Monero was originally introduced as a hard fork of Bytecoin (BCN) — a decentralized and privacy-oriented cryptocurrency created in 2012. While Monero has its origins in Bytecoin, it built upon and improved the decentralization, security and privacy features of Bytecoin’s CryptoNote technology.&nbsp;Monero’s core team comprises a largely anonymous group of developers. Riccardo Spagni (a.k.a. ‘Fluffypony’) and David Latapie are, however, Monero’s two publicly known contributors. XMR, the native coin of Monero, is a decentralized privacy coin.<h2 dir="ltr">XMR price</h2>Like most cryptocurrencies launched during its time, XMR price in USD terms didn’t have any noteworthy movement in the early days. XMR price stayed well under $1 throughout 2015 and only started picking up in Aug 2016. According to our live XMR/USDT price chart, the coin rallied to around $14 in September that year.XMR coin’s next big surge came alongside a market-wide rally starting in January 2017. Its price broke out of the resistance at $14 by March 2017 and kept climbing month after month, closing in on $500 by late December 2017.XMR peaked in early January 2018, setting an all-time high of just under $550. At the time, Monero's market cap reached nearly $8.5 billion.XMR price went into a corrective phase thereafter, dropping under $50 by the end of 2018. It couldn’t break the $100 barrier for most of 2019 and 2020, springing back to life only in October 2020 — almost 7 months into the Covid-19 pandemic. This resurgence catapulted XMR coin to yet another high of nearly $480 in May 2021. It has since lost half of its ground, trading in the vicinity of $200 in 2022.<h2 dir="ltr">How XMR works</h2>Monero blockchain is secured using a unique, community-created, CPU-friendly and ASIC-resistant Proof-of-Work algorithm called RandomX. One of its main highlights is its ASIC-resistance, implying that it prevents hash-rate domination by powerful ASIC mining equipment, ensuring that anyone can mine XMR coin using regular computers. A new block gets created every 2 minutes on the Monero blockchain and the block rewards are handed over to the miners.XMR, like BTC, can be used to pay for goods and services, as well as traded against other crypto coins on exchanges.Monero accomplishes its core objective with the help of three main privacy technologies – stealth addresses, ring confidential transactions (RingCT) and ring signatures. Combined together, these three conceal the receiver, amount, and the sender of the transaction, respectively. All transactions done on the Monero network are believed to stay private, with no possibility of even accidentally conducting a transparent transaction.<h2 dir="ltr">XMR news, updates and highlights </h2>In recent <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/04/19/privacy-focused-monero-plans-hard-fork-in-july-xmr-surges-11-on-monerun/">XMR news</a>, the blockchain’s developer community announced in April 2022, via a <a href="https://github.com/monero-project/meta/issues/690">GitHub post</a>, that the network will undergo a hard fork in July 2022. Please note, Monero used to hard fork every 6 months prior to Oct 18, 2020, the date of its last hard fork. These bi-annual hard forks were meant to regularly introduce significant consensus changes to the network, resulting in additional network-wide improvements and privacy enhancements. However, the core team decided that this wasn’t necessary anymore as the protocol had accomplished ample maturity and stability.&nbsp;The upcoming Monero hard fork will occur at a block height of 2,668,888, leading to more optimized security as well as certain fee changes on the network. This will be version fifteen (V15) of the Monero blockchain.<h2 dir="ltr">Frequently asked questions about XMR</h2><ul><li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">Can you mine XMR?</li></ul>Yes, you can mine Monero using any desktop or laptop computer. <ul><li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">What are some of the best XMR wallets?</li></ul>You can use a wide variety of Monero wallets to store your XMR coins. Some of them are Monero GUI Wallet, Monero CLI Wallet, Feather, Cake Wallet, MyMonero, Ledger Nano S/X and Trezor Model T.&nbsp;<ul><li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">Can I pay for goods and services with XMR?</li></ul>Yes, you can use your XMR coins to pay for goods and services. Please visit <a href="https://www.getmonero.org/community/merchants/">the official Monero website</a> to locate various stores and merchants where you can pay with XMR.<ul><li dir="ltr" aria-level="1">How to buy XMR?</li></ul>You can easily buy XMR from various reputed crypto exchanges including OKX, Binance, Gate.io Huobi Global and KuCoin. Its easy to find XMR pairs with well-known crypto assets like <a href="https://coin360.com/coin/bitcoin-btc">BTC</a>, <a href="https://coin360.com/coin/ethereum-eth">ETH</a>, <a href="https://coin360.com/coin/ripple-xrp">XRP</a>, <a href="https://coin360.com/coin/tether-usdt">USDT</a>, <a href="https://coin360.com/coin/cardano-ada">ADA</a> and others.

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