The privacy-focused digital currency monero (XMR) has seen double-digit gains this week, while most of the crypto economy has suffered losses and seen a period of consolidation. Just recently, XMR made headlines after a cybersecurity firm warned that torrent files containing the “Spider-Man: No Way Home” film may contain malicious monero mining malware.
Mining malware reports have plagued the Monero community for years as some applications exist which hijack a victim’s CPU, and then mine monero without the victim knowing. The act is sometimes referred to as “cryptojacking.”
Year-to-date, monero (XMR) has gained 58% against the U.S. dollar and the crypto asset has a market capitalization of around $4.4 billion, ranked 44th among 12,135 crypto assets. XMR represents 0.19% of the $2.3 trillion crypto-economy on January 1, 2022.
XMR has a 24-hour price range of around $227.51 to $248.45 per unit and tether (USDT) is the asset’s biggest trading pair with 42% of all trades. This is followed by BTC (18.39%), ETH (7.83%), USD (5.94%), EUR (3.35%), GBP (2.32%), and JPY (2.32%).
Monero (XMR) is an open-source digital currency network based on Cryptonote technology authored by Nicolas van Saberhagen in 2013. The blockchain network is said to be obfuscated but the blockchain surveillance firm Ciphertrace claims it has monero tracing capabilities.
The project’s privacy techniques include IP address obscuring, ring signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, bulletproofs, and stealth addresses. At the end of August 2021, a Monero developer announced BTC to XMR atomic swap capabilities. Additionally, monero (XMR) is leveraged on a number of darknet marketplaces.
Monero also faces numerous privacy-coin competitors such as horizen (ZEN), dash (DASH), and zcash (ZEC). ZEN, for instance, has gained 438% year-to-date against the U.S. dollar and ZEC increased 130.8% this past year.
