Monero, popularly known as XMR, is a unique kind of cryptocurrency which provides total privacy while performing its functions. Here are some facts that you must know about Monero!

1. Fixed production rate and cap

Monero comes with a fixed production rate of 0.3 coins per minute. Also, the total supply of Monero limits to 18.4 million coins! By simple economic theory, if the demand for Monero stays the same, its value should increase since the number of XMR coins will continue to get scarce.

2. Privacy

Monero provides privacy to its user like no other cryptocurrency. No one can check your account balance or track your transactions.

3. Untraceable

Being a cryptocurrency, all these coins are encrypted and therefore cannot be traced back into the blockchain!

4. Fungible

Monero comes with fungible property which means that every mined coin has the same value in the market regardless of place and time. As Monero transactions are completely private and there is no transaction trail present, there is no concept of ‘tainted’ and ‘clean’ coins will can cause the difference in the price. Hence, Monero is completely fungible!

5. Stealth address

Stealth addresses provide high level privacy in Monero transactions. These addresses do not allow anyone outside this address to track or see the transactions. It’s a concealed blockchain that works.

6. Ring Signatures

Ring signatures are the digital signatures that are done by any member of the ring or the group. This feature helps in transaction mixing. This means that a certain amount is sent as a group of randomly picked ring signatures of the same amount. One among all these is the real sender. In this way, the identity of the sender remains hidden.

7. Obfuscation

Using Kovari, an open source technology, allows Monero to hide the IP addresses used when performing transactions on Monero. Kovari uses encryption as well as routing techniques to achieve this.

8. Multiple keys

Monero has multiple number of keys which increases the level of security and privacy. Other cryptocurrencies have only one public and private key but Monero has multiple private and public keys. There are view and spend keys, which are further classified as private and public keys.

9. Dynamic Scalability

Unlike Bitcoin, which comes with a block size limit of 1 MB, Monero has no such predefined block size limit. But, in order to prevent malicious users from mining huge blocks, block reward penalty is implemented.

For example, the median of last 100 blocks, known as M100 is taken. Block size above twice of M100 is not allowed and below 60 KB, there is no block penalty reward. The size which is greater than M100 but less than 2*100 has a block penalty reward which is according to how much greater the size is.

10. ASIC resistant

The hashing algorithm used in Monero, known as ‘CryptoNight’, makes it ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) resistant! As this algorithm limits parallel hashing and is CPU and GPU friendly, it becomes ASIC resistant and reduces a great deal of cost for miners.