Monero Price (XMR)

Monero is an open source project maintained by a group of core developers and a community of open source contributors and researchers. There are no public details about the founders in the public space; the first whitepaper with a focus on the CryptoNote protocol was written by Nicolas van Saberhagen (assumed to be a pseudonym). In 2018, it was widely reported in the crypto press that Monero had 7 members, 49 developers, and 3 researchers, with the unofficial figurehead of ‘pseudonymous Luigi’.

In 2017, there was some controversy about a Javascript mining software called Coinhive which generates a script allowing websites or apps to access a visitor's Central Processing Unit and mine Monero. The site or app owner gets a percentage of the coins mined while visitors are consuming content on their site. Coinhive did not require the third-parties to tell visitors that their computers were being accessed and their electricity consumed in exchange for a site visit.

Monero suffered another PR issue in 2018 when hackers took advantage of weak code to manipulate the amount of XMR shown in a wallet, before convincing exchanges to pay out.

A team of researchers from a broad collection of institutions, including Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, Boston University, MIT, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, also claim that a token’s movements on Monero are not as obscured as they seem and that it is possible to extract information on individual transactions.