A brief history
Monero, originally called Bitmonero, was launched in 2014 after a hard fork from Bytecoin. Monero (XMR) is a cryptocurrency focused on privacy. It aims to allow payments to be made quickly and inexpensively without fear of censorship. Monero is unique in that it’s designed to keep wallets and transactions completely anonymous, including network members, developers, and miners. Monero alleviates privacy concerns using the concepts of ring signatures and stealth addresses. Ring signatures enable a sender to conceal their identity from other participants in a group. To generate a ring signature, the Monero platform uses a combination of a sender’s account keys and combines it with public keys on the blockchain, making it unique as well as private. It hides the sender's identity, as it is computationally impossible to ascertain which of the group members' keys was used to produce the complex signature.

XMR in practice
Monero works similarly to other major cryptocurrencies, using proof-of-work mining to control the issuance of XMR and to incentivize miners to add blocks to the blockchain. The currency supports a mining process where individuals get rewarded for their activities by joining mining pools, or they can mine coins individually. Additionally, as transactions can’t easily be traced on its blockchain, users may more freely exercise their ability to send and accept crypto in all types of transactions.