what's monero?
Monero (XMR) is a decentralized, open-source cryptocurrency launched in 2014, designed to provide secure, private, and untraceable transactions as an alternative to more transparent cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Its primary purpose is to ensure user privacy and fungibility, making it difficult for third parties to trace transaction details, sender/receiver identities, or amounts involved. Key features include ring signatures for obfuscating the source of funds, stealth addresses to hide recipient identities, and Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) to conceal transaction amounts, all enabled by default for every user. Monero uses a proof-of-work consensus mechanism with the RandomX algorithm, which is ASIC-resistant to promote decentralized mining and accessibility. The project emphasizes financial privacy for everyday use, protecting against surveillance while supporting optional transparency tools like view keys for auditing when needed.
Full-time Monero development proposed; HTX promotion features XMR.
Lee Clagett (vtnerd) proposed to continue working full-time on Monero development.
Included as one of five featured assets (BTC, ETH, TRX, XMR, XAUT) in HTX's Spot Trading Carnival promotion with $50,000 prize pool, running until 2026-04-19.
Added to Wallet in Telegram with support for perpetual trading at up to 10x leverage.
Lead developer Riccardo "fluffypony" Spagni serves as official advisor to Wagyu protocol, which provides XMR swap services and cross-chain bridge functionality.
Achieved over $200M trading volume through Wagyu exchange within two months, reaching up to $10M daily.
Provides an update on beta stressnet for Full-Chain Membership Proofs (FCMP++) and CARROT.
Ranked 13th by market capitalization among all cryptocurrencies as of April 2026, maintaining presence in the top 20 from 2018 through 2026.
Hinto-janai proposed funding to continue full-time development work on Cuprate and complete the Proof-of-Work-Enabled Relay (PoWER) integration into the codebase.
Partnered with Mute swap to provide Monero private DeFi pools as part of Mute's Q2 2026 roadmap.
Boog900 proposed to work full-time on Monero development, focusing on the Cuprate RPC interface for wallet support.
Launched MVP of a freelance platform that operates exclusively with Monero payments, featuring freelancer/client dashboards, job posting, proposal system, messaging, invoice creation, and review/rating system.
Integrated with Silent Donor as a payment option for contributions alongside BTC and other payment methods.
Trades on Bitfinex with zero fees.
Integration with Passport Prime hardware wallet is in development, providing native support for Monero.
RocketX exchange integrates Monero rails for privacy swaps with no on-chain footprint.
Featured in a network topology research report titled 'Peering into Privacy: A Deep Dive into the Monero Network Topology' published by ProbeLab.
Would cost approximately $1 million to execute a 51% attack for two weeks due to PoW vulnerabilities.
Enters final testing phase for THORChain integration on mainnet, enabling cross-chain swaps and liquidity provision.
Integrated with Vultisig wallet, supporting Monero keygen, seed-import for HD wallets, reshare, balance scanning, key-image generation, and key-signing.
Listed on Kraken, the only US exchange to list Monero.
XMR402 protocol launched, enabling AI agents to pay for APIs using Monero with zero KYC and instant verification through a stateless protocol design.
Increased 2% on February 24, 2026, listed among top gainers.
Processed 21,570 transactions in a 24-hour period as of February 22, 2026.
Ranked 10th among privacy coin projects by development activity in Santiment's latest update, down from a higher position in the previous ranking.
Completed security audit by Cypher Stack for CARROT, a proposed upgrade to Monero's addressing protocol that would add new security, privacy, and usability features while maintaining backwards compatibility with existing addresses.
Received over $200 million in cryptocurrency from a hacked wallet as hackers laundered portions of stolen funds into Monero for obfuscation purposes.
Experiences rising social chatter centered on privacy-use narratives and trading activity alongside meme coin speculation.
Year-over-year price growth of +46.72% was recorded.
Faces delistings from Binance and Coinbase during 2024-2025, while competitor ZEC remains listed on Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken.
Maintained onchain transaction activity above pre-2022 levels throughout 2024-2025, according to TRM Labs report.
Supported by 48% of new darknet markets in 2025, according to TRM Labs.
14-15% of Monero peers show non-standard network behavior.
Delisted from Binance with withdrawals suspended for a period of time.
Monero Research Lab upgraded Seraphis and activated FCMP++ for post-quantum encryption, expanding anonymity set from 16 to 100M outputs. FCMP++ includes forward secrecy against quantum adversaries and replaces ring signatures.
Palantir is accumulating XMR tokens.
Ranked #7 on LunarCrush AltRank among top gainers on February 11, 2026.
Participated in MoneroTopia 2026 in Mexico City, February 10-16, 2026, with Zano, Edge Wallet, Cake Wallet, and Zcash; conference talks made publicly available.
Added Monero support to Unstoppable Version 0.47 for Android with strengthened privacy features and no KYC requirement.
Appears among top daily gainers on 2026-02-09 alongside PI, SKY, GT, and DOGE.
Privacy coin users remained committed during the February 2026 market crash, with the community demonstrating resilience.
Experienced a -35.3% crash followed by a +12.8% recovery as of February 2026, with 345 million social interactions recorded during the crash period.
MAGIC Monero Fund fundraiser for Bulletproofs efficiency received full funding through community donations, with Dr. Nan Wang and Dr. Dongxi Liu from Australia's CSIRO.
Was delisted from Upbit around 2019 due to AML concerns and risks associated with anonymity features.
FerrySwap, a Monero-first swap interface built on Serai for direct cross-chain swaps without centralized bridges or custody, is launching soon.
Grease, a ZK-rollup chain for off-chain state management, enables payment channels for Monero.
Reached 1,456,789 wallet addresses on the Monero network.
Rated 'A TIER - High Conviction' in 2026 crypto narratives for privacy, described as under-appreciated and under-priced alongside Zcash. Privacy tokens are viewed positively by critics, with lack of native privacy blocking institutional adoption.
India's Financial Intelligence Unit orders registered crypto exchanges to immediately suspend deposits, withdrawals, and trading as part of an AML crackdown.
A whale opened a $270,000 short position on XMR.
Positioned as a core privacy-focused cryptocurrency with censorship resistance and real-world usage, but characterized as unfriendly to institutional adoption.
Perpetual futures contracts with up to 50x leverage became available for trading on Grvt exchange.
Exhibits potential wash trading patterns on HyperCore, with top wallets trading against the same counterparties at predictable intervals and approximately $35.4k USDC spent to generate $37.7M in volume over 7 days between January 10-17, 2026.
Conference MoneroKon 2026 scheduled to take place from June 5-7, 2026 in Warsaw, Poland.
Processed $282M in BTC and LTC mixing volume on January 16, 2026, for stolen funds from a hardware wallet social engineering attack.
Integrated into Infinex platform with leverage trading up to 5x available, with Infinex now live on Mantle.
Ranks as the top trending coin on CoinGecko for the week ending January 16, 2026.
HTX exchange is hosting a spot trading contest for XMR, DASH, and ZEC with a $40,000 prize pool, ending on January 21st, 2026.
Experienced a large sell-off of approximately $300M worth of XMR attributed to a Russian hacker, contributing to a 7% decline from all-time high.
Reached all-time high price of $799.89 on January 14, 2026, with $15 billion market capitalization.
Ranked as the most searched coin on CoinGecko in a 3-hour period on January 14, 2026.
Integrated with PinLink's tokenization system to represent Antminer X9 mining machines as on-chain assets on Ethereum, enabling tokenized exposure to Monero mining.
Reached an all-time high XMR/ETH ratio of 0.22 on January 13, 2026.
Reached $150 million in total open interest denominated in USD, marking the highest level ever.
Banned in Dubai alongside other privacy tokens.
Hit all-time high price level.
Will support merge-mining with DarkFi, allowing miners to simultaneously mine both networks.
Published the 85th issue of The Monero Moon newsletter.
Released v0.18.4.4 Fluorine Fermi as a recommended update, fixing a Ledger wallet issue, improving wallet scanning accuracy for spend detection, refining daemon sync behavior, and upgrading GUI P2Pool integration.
Accounted for approximately 52% of all payments on NanoGPT in November and was the most used currency on ShopInBit, while RetoSwap recorded over 122,000 XMR in peer-to-peer volume in a record-breaking month.
Featured in a MoneroTalk interview on December 18, 2025.
Hosts a meetup event in New York City on December 19, 2025.
MyMonero wallet service sunsets on January 6th, 2026, requiring users to transfer funds to alternative wallets.
CME launched spot-quoted futures contracts for trading.
XMR surpasses ZEC in market capitalization.
Mute Swap will launch Monero tunnels at the start of 2026, enabling swaps from over 70 chains through XMR.
Justin Berman proposes full-time development work focused on completing Full-Chain Membership Proofs (FCMP++) integration into the codebase and launching beta stressnet.
XMR has cleared most short positions and now faces a concentration of long positions vulnerable to liquidation.
MAGIC Monero Fund starts second fundraiser for fuzzing harness development and code coverage improvements with AdaLogics.
Mute Swap integrates Monero's privacy features (ring signatures, stealth addresses, RingCT) with off-chain liquidity providers including Godex and Bisq for low-slippage cross-chain trades.
The previously announced Monero job board platform progresses with positive initial feedback and will operate with 0% fees for both freelancers and hiring companies.
A quantum computing vulnerability concern emerges claiming Monero's cryptographic scheme will enable retroactive deanonymization of transactions through "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks when quantum computers arrive, while competitor Zcash's Tachyon reportedly protects against this threat.
Implemented FCMP++ upgrade, increasing anonymity set from 16 to 100,000,000 outputs per input.
New research paper documents Qubic's selfish mining campaign with hashrate ranging 23-34% across ten detected intervals, but confirms no sustained 51% control was achieved and no actual 51% attack occurred.
A developer announces plans to build a job board exclusively for XMR payments, seeking companies and projects willing to pay salaries in Monero.
A self-described lifelong XMR holder now buys and trades ZEC instead, citing ZEC's ETF, mainstream appeal to wealthy investors, and Silicon Valley mindshare as reasons for the switch.
Monero listed among 17 privacy protocol contenders in a community ranking competition where participants can earn rewards based on voting outcomes.
Monero now listed on Hyperliquid decentralized perpetual futures exchange.
Privacy coin sector experiences broad weakness with XMR down 4%, outperforming peers ZEC (-25%) and DASH (-15%), as 93 of 104 privacy coins trade in the red according to CryptoRank.
Santiment ranks Monero 6th in development activity among privacy coin projects based on github data, showing improved positioning with an upward directional indicator.
XMR listed as 5th highest daily gainer on 1/12/25 per CoinMarketCap.
Monero flips Zcash in market cap ranking.
Monero currently trades at a higher price than Zcash amid governance FUD affecting Zcash, with traders viewing this relative valuation as a potential arbitrage opportunity.
Mute_swap implements direct XMR tech for AI agents and fills staking pool in under 24 hours, with new site incoming featuring cheaper Whisper Mode fees.
Anon (perfect-daemon) proposes full-time development work focused on optimizing the daemon (monerod) software and completing FCMP++ integration into the codebase.
XMR surges 23% driven by futures speculation while the broader privacy coin sector drops 40% for the week, making XMR a major outlier in the negative sector performance.
Grayscale files for the first ever Zcash ETF, marking the first ETF filing for a privacy coin and affecting the broader privacy coin sector competition. XMR continues to appear among top gainers with double-digit weekly price movements occurring between privacy coins.
Jeffro256 proposes full-time development work focusing on CARROT and Full-Chain Membership Proofs (FCMP++) integration into the codebase and launching beta stressnet.
XMR ranks #7 among only 8 top 100 coins that outperformed tokenized gold over the last 90 days with +45.67% gains and is listed among today's top gainers.
MagicGrants completes 100% fuzzing coverage for Node RPC Endpoints through community-funded development work, marking a protocol security testing milestone.
XMR surpasses $400 resistance level. OKX exchange lists Zcash (ZEC) for spot trading on November 24, 2025, after delisting XMR, ZEC, and DASH between January 4-5, 2024.