XMRUSD
Monero / United States dollar
crypto

Aimed at privacy-preservation and fungibility, 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. Monero, the protocol, is a distributed, time-stamped ledger of unspent transaction output (UTXO) transfers stored in an append-only chain of dynamic-sized data blocks. A network of mining and economic nodes maintains this blockchain by validating, propagating, and competing to include pending transactions (mempool) in new blocks. Economic nodes (aka "full nodes") receive transactions from other network participants, validate them against network consensus rules and double-spend vectors, and propagate the transactions to other full nodes that also validate and propagate. Valid transactions are sent to the network's mempool waiting for mining nodes to confirm them via inclusion in the next block. Mining nodes work to empty the mempool usually in a highest-to-lowest fee order by picking transactions to include in the next block and racing against each other to generate a hash less than the target number set by Monero's difficulty adjustment algorithm. Monero uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to establish the chain of blocks with the most accumulated "work" (a.k.a., energy spent on solved hashes) as the valid chain. Monero runs a proof-of-work algorithm called RandomX, an algorithm using random code execution and memory-hard techniques for ASIC resistance. Monero initiates hard forks every 6 months to implement upgrades to the protocol, often times changing its PoW algorithm to prevent ASICs from joining the network. Monero's privacy enhancements stem from ring signatures, which mask sender identities and offers single-use keys to make transactions untraceable. Ring signatures merge a group of signers together to better preserve the anonymity of the true signer. The group is comprised of the actual signers single use key initiating the transaction and past transaction outputs from Monero's blockchain. Including past transaction outputs helps preserve the senders anonymity because they are theoretically indistinguishable to an outside observer as the valid transaction itself. In January 2017, Monero implemented Ring Confidential Transactions (Ring CTs) in an effort to combat concerns around the true degree of anonymity offered by Monero. Ring signatures only provided privacy for the sender of the transaction, and required outputs to be broken up into separate rings because ring signatures could only contain outputs of the same value. Ring CT signatures aimed to alleviate these concerns by obscuring transaction amounts for each entry in the ring signature, in addition to obscuring the transaction address. With Ring CTs wallets could arbitrarily select ring members from any output size. To prove that certain amounts were spent, Ring CTs used range proofs, a zero knowledge cryptography technique used to prove the amount used in a transaction with revealing the details. However, the range proofs used in Monero's confidential transactions to ensure the integrity of transactions, were computationally intensive, leading the Monero blockchain to bloat due to the onerous data requirements of each transaction. Thus, in October 2018 Monero implemented bulletproofs, which addressed this scalability issue, cutting the size of its confidential transactions by at least 80 percent and significantly increasing transaction efficiency. Bulletproofs are a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof that does not require a trusted setup. Bulletproofs aggregate information into new data structures that scale logarithmically, rather than linearly, allowing even greater scaling for larger transactions that contain multiple outputs.