This week, the developers of Monero (XMR) patched a bug that could allow an attacker to ‘burn’ the funds of an organization’s wallet. The breach was initially revealed by a community member, and XMR developers were quick enough to fix it before any damage was done.
Simply put, Monero (XMR) is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin (BTC), but with an additional focus on anonymity. It was established in 2014, when bitcointalk.org user thankful_for_today forked the codebase of Bytecoin into the name BitMonero. To establish the new coin, he used ideas that were first outlined in a 2013 white paper called ‘Cryptonote’ that was written by an anonymous personality Nicolas van Saberhagen. Ironically, BitMonero was soon forked itself by open-source developers, and titled ‘Monero’ (which means ‘coin’ in Esperanto). It has remained to be an open-source project ever since.
XMR has considerably more privacy properties than BTC: Instead of just being a decentralized coin, Monero is designed to be fully anonymous and virtually untraceable. Thus, XMR is based on the CryptoNight proof-of-work (PoW) hash algorithm, which allows it to use ‘ring signatures’ (which mix the spender’s address with a group of others, making it more difficult to trace transactions), ‘stealth addresses’ (which are generated for each transaction and make it impossible to discover the actual destination of a transaction by anyone else other than the sender and the receiver), and ‘ring confidential transactions’ (which hide the transferred amount).
In 2016, XMR experienced more growth in market capitalization and transaction volume than any other cryptocurrency (almost a 2800 percent increase, as per CoinMarketCap). A lot of that growth came from the underground economy. Being an altcoin that is tailor-made for fully private transactions, Monero eventually became accepted as a form of currency on darknet markets like Alphabay and Oasis.
