When everyone talks about anon-based cryptocurrencies, one of the first tokens mentioned is Dash. The number 7 top cryptocurrency market capitalization is held by the Dash community. However, another anonymous digital currency is moving steadily up the ladder without all the frills and marketing called Monero. Without a steady influx of campaigning the Monero currency has managed to grow to be the second most popular anon coin with a market capitalization of over $17 million.
Monero isn’t new, and some may not have heard about the cryptocurrency yet. Despite this, the token is being regularly adopted and has grown quite a bit in value. Currently, Monero is resting at $1.40 per XMR at the time of writing and people believe it has maintained integrity since its inception in April of 2014. Unlike typical coin shuffling procedures which some would say are not entirely honest about anonymous sending features, Monero uses the CryptoNote protocol which has been deemed superior in some cryptographic circles. The team explains that Monero’s modular code architecture has been praised by Wladimir J. van der Laan, the Bitcoin Core developer.
CryptoNote-based currencies cannot be traced through the blockchain like Bitcoin because of its ring signature technology and the origin, destination, and amounts become very obfuscated using the protocol. Ring signatures were invented by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Yael Tauman giving the world of cryptography a new type of key process. The method is similar to group signatures, but there is no way to reveal the anonymity of single users within the group of users. The only people who can witness the data for what it is would be the sender and receiver. Another aspect of CryptoNote technology is that it is not a fork of Bitcoin and Monero was coded from scratch in a similar fashion to Bytecoin. Monero’s nodes don’t have a hard coded limit which means it should be able to scale more properly than other cryptocurrencies that are limited to a 1MB or 2MB block sizes. Monero’s website explains its anonymous features are due to the cryptographic enhancements of ring signatures:
“By taking advantage of ring signatures, a special property of certain types of cryptography, Monero enables untraceable transactions. This means it’s ambiguous which funds have been spent, and thus extremely unlikely that a transaction could be linked to particular user.”
Dash has made quite a name for itself over the years and has a larger capitalization at the moment with $44 million in its coffers. The currency is praised for its Masternode architecture and governance system using the Masternode voting system. The cryptocurrency uses Darksend, which is basically an advanced shuffling system that obfuscates transactions. However, it has been said by those who disagree with its methods that coin shuffling is subpar compared to ring signature technology. Alongside this, it has been said that many Masternodes run across clearnet and centralized servers which conflates the idea that its anonymous capabilities are efficient. Despite this Dash is the most recognized anon-based cryptocurrency and its healthy community and protocol continues its climb to the top.
Monero has other attributes people dig as well, being one of the only cryptocurrencies paired in market trading on the popular exchange Poloniex. Just as Litecoin was paired with its own markets on Poloniex offers XMR trading directly with most of its other altcoin selections. The cryptocurrency has a long ways to go to catch up to Dash, but the team seems to be modestly moving forward without caring what others think or speculate. It will have to stay competitive with Dash and the upcoming Zcash release. The founder of the untraceable digital currency Zcash, Zooko Wilcox, launched the public alpha of the project back in January 2016. Zcash was also recently praised by Edward Snowden.
The world of Anon-based cryptocurrencies are not as big as they once were a couple of years ago when Altcoins proposing anonymity features seemed to be everywhere. Currently, there are only a few strong communities left, and this includes Monero and Dash. There isn’t a big marketing campaign surrounding the Monero protocol, but it is definitely one to watch as its technology is intriguing to many and some consider it underrated.
Sources: Monero Websites, Wikipedia, Twitter, Dash Websites, Zcash, Github, Poloniex, and Bitcointalk.org
Images: Monero Websites, Dash Websites, and Pixabay