About

Monero is a Bytecoin code fork providing anonymous value transfer through ring signatures, stealth addresses, confidential transactions, and bulletproofs. Monero offers anonymity by default in contrast to the optional privacy preserving functionalities of its peers. In pursuit of decentralization Monero continually changes its proof-of-work algorithm in order to prevent ASICs from dominating and centralizing the mining process.

History

Monero traces its origins back to Bytecoin, the first implementation of CryptoNote, which was an application layer protocol aimed at solving various issues with Bitcoin such as traceability, mining centralization, and irregular coin emission. Bytecoin launched in March 2014; however, after a controversial 80% premine, a Bitcointalk forum user known as thankful_for_today forked the codebase of Bytecoin into the a new project named BitMonero, a compound of Bit (as in Bitcoin) and Monero (meaning "coin" in Esperanto).

The release of BitMonero was poorly received by the community that initially backed it, leading seven community members to fork BitMonero into a new project called Monero. This largely pseudonymous group, led by Fluffypony (Riccardo Spagni), ultimately became the first Monero Core team. Monero launched its project in April 2014 with no premine.

Monero's payment anonymity has garnered significant attention from a panoply of crypto-curious persons. Since its launch Monero has become one of the most widely used darknet currencies in the world due to its anonymity by default features. In 2017 Monero further enhanced its privacy features by incorporating Ring CT signatures, a solution proposed by Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell, that obscures transaction amounts for each entry in the ring signature, in addition to obscuring the transaction address. This provided near complete transaction anonymity in contrast to just sender anonymity as it was previously. In October 2018, Monero implemented bulletproofs, a zero-knowledge proof technology that replaced the previous zero-knowledge range proofs that its confidential transactions relied on. Bulletproofs cut the size of its confidential transactions by at least 80 percent, significantly increasing transaction efficiency.

Monero undergoes scheduled hard forks every six months intended to allow Monero to evolve at a regular cadence, while still leaving users enough time to update before being forked away from the network. These hard forks tend to include everything from patches and bug fixes to hashing algorithm changes and functionality upgrades.

In December 2019, Fluffypony (Riccardo Spagni), Monero's lead maintainer stepped down from the project in an effort to further decentralize the project.