Monero

XMR is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency that hides senders, receivers and amounts by default.

Monero (XMR) is a digital currency focused on private, censorship-resistant payments. It launched in April 2014 as a fair, pre-announced launch of the CryptoNote code, with no premine and no share of block rewards for developers. Its first mined block is dated 18 April 2014. There is no company or foundation that issues XMR: a Core Team oversees the project, more than 500 developers have contributed, and work is funded by community donations through the Community Crowdfunding System.

Privacy is on by default. Stealth addresses hide the receiver, ring signatures hide which coins are being spent, and RingCT hides amounts, so outsiders cannot follow payments on the public ledger the way they can on Bitcoin. The project argues that this makes every coin interchangeable (fungible). The same privacy is why regulators and exchanges treat Monero as a high-risk 'privacy coin': Binance delisted it in 2024, Kraken dropped it for European customers, and Dubai, the DIFC and, from July 2027, the EU restrict it on regulated platforms.

Monero is secured by miners using RandomX, a proof-of-work algorithm built for ordinary computer processors to keep mining open to many people. Blocks come about every two minutes. Since May 2022 each block pays a fixed tail emission of 0.6 XMR plus fees, so supply keeps growing slowly, by under 1% a year: about 18.81 million XMR existed on 27 September 2026. In August 2025 an outside project, Qubic, claimed more than half of Monero's hashrate and a six-block reorganisation followed, showing that mining power can concentrate.

The next big upgrade, FCMP++, would replace small groups of decoys with a proof over all past outputs to strengthen privacy; as of May 2026 no fork date was set. XMR ranked 14th by market value on 27 September 2026, at about $10.4 billion.