

Marketing material distributed by the Monero community promoting crypto-anarchism Similar to the core development team, a portion of the MRL chooses to remain anonymous or otherwise work pseudonymously. The lab is a rotating cast of researchers, scientist, cryptographers, and developers. Improvements to Monero's protocol and features are, in part, the task of the Monero Research Lab (MRL). Much of the core development team chooses to remain anonymous. The protocol's lead maintainer was previously South African developer Riccardo Spagni. Monero has the third largest community of developers, behind bitcoin and Ethereum. Both van Saberhagen and thankful_for_today remain anonymous.

Monero translates to coin in Esperanto, and the Esperanto moneroj is sometimes used for plural. Other forum users disagreed with thankful_for_today's direction for BitMonero, so forked it in 2014 to create monero. A Bitcointalk forum user " thankful_for_today" coded these ideas into a coin they dubbed BitMonero. The author described privacy and anonymity as "the most important aspects of electronic cash" and called bitcoin's traceability a "critical flaw". Monero's roots can be traced back to CryptoNote, a cryptocurrency protocol first described in a white paper published by Nicolas van Saberhagen (presumed pseudonymous) in October 2013. The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has posted bounties for contractors that can develop monero tracing technologies.

It is increasingly used in illicit activities such as money laundering, darknet markets, ransomware, and cryptojacking. Its privacy features have attracted cypherpunks and users desiring privacy measures not provided in other cryptocurrencies. Monero has the third largest developer community among cryptocurrencies, behind bitcoin and Ethereum. The algorithm issues new coins to miners, and was designed to be resistant to ASIC mining. Transactions are validated through a miner network running RandomX, a proof of work algorithm. These features are baked into the protocol, though users can optionally share view keys for third party auditing. Monero uses ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, "stealth addresses", and IP address obscuring methods to obfuscate transaction details. The cryptography community used this concept to design Monero, and deployed its mainnet in 2014. The protocol is open source and based on CryptoNote, a concept described in a 2013 white paper authored by Nicolas van Saberhagen. Observers cannot decipher addresses trading monero, transaction amounts, address balances, or transaction histories. It uses a public distributed ledger with privacy-enhancing technologies that obfuscate transactions to achieve anonymity and fungibility. Monero ( / m ə ˈ n ɛr oʊ/ XMR) is a decentralized cryptocurrency.
