Monero is still one of the most unusual assets in crypto. Its survival case rests on mandatory privacy, a January 2026 FCMP++ upgrade that pushed the anonymity set from 16 possible spenders to the full history of the chain, and an organizational model with no company behind it, only community-funded contributors.
The article, written by A Fox in Web3 and translated by TechFlow, argues that Monero remains one of the oldest and most important cryptocurrencies in the privacy segment even without a recent catalyst as singular as Zcash’s Orchard bug and the later Ironwood upgrade. What it does have is a major privacy overhaul that the piece describes as the largest in its history.
One of the earliest major privacy coins
Monero launched in April 2014 from a fork of Bytecoin by a small group of developers, most of whom chose to remain anonymous. It was built as a privacy-focused cryptocurrency with protections embedded at the base protocol layer, hiding the sender, the recipient, and the amount in every transaction by default.
That default setting is the defining split between Monero and Zcash. In Zcash, shielded transfers are optional. In Monero, privacy is mandatory, and there is no transparent mode to fall back on.
The article puts XMR at roughly $410 with a market capitalization of about $7.7 billion, ranking it 13th among crypto assets. It notes that Monero and Zcash sit close in market value while taking sharply different approaches to the same problem.
Price action has been volatile. The piece says XMR gained more than 126% at one point in 2025 and reached a record high near $800 in January 2026. More than a year of difficult trading followed, leaving the token about 50% below that peak.
How Monero’s privacy stack works
Monero’s privacy comes from three techniques applied together to every transaction.
- Ring signatures mix one real input with 15 decoy inputs pulled from the blockchain, making it difficult for outside observers to determine which of the 16 is the actual spender.
- Stealth addresses generate a fresh one-time address for each incoming payment, so repeated use of the same public address does not let observers link those payments together on-chain.
- RingCT hides the transferred amount with cryptographic commitments while still allowing the network to verify that no coins were created out of thin air.
The report says each part closes a different leak, and users cannot disable one layer in exchange for transparency because Monero offers no transparent mode.
Ring signatures, though, have had a real weakness. A 16-member ring is much stronger than no privacy at all, but the article says chain analysis has, over time, found statistical ways to narrow the likely real input more often than a true 1-in-16 random guess would suggest.
FCMP++ replaces rings with full-chain membership proofs
Monero’s answer is FCMP++, activated network-wide in January 2026. The upgrade replaces ring signatures with full-chain membership proofs.
Instead of proving that an input is one of 16 possible spenders, FCMP++ proves that the input belongs somewhere within more than 150 million past outputs across the chain’s history without revealing where. In the article’s framing, the anonymity set moves from 16 to effectively the entire blockchain, while each proof remains compact at roughly 3 KB to 4 KB.
The author presents that as Monero’s biggest privacy upgrade to date and a major jump in its anonymity guarantees.
RandomX and the mining model
Monero also pushes decentralization at the mining layer. It uses RandomX, a proof-of-work algorithm tuned to run efficiently on standard computer CPUs.
The goal is to resist specialized mining hardware that can concentrate hash power in a small number of large operations, a pattern the piece compares with what has happened on networks such as Bitcoin.
The cost of mandatory privacy
The same design that defines Monero has also made it difficult for regulated exchanges to keep listing XMR. The article argues that Zcash’s optional shielding is one reason it has had an easier path on major venues, while Monero’s unconditional privacy leaves less room for compliance workarounds.
According to the piece, OKX delisted XMR pairs in January 2024. Binance removed it globally in February 2024. Kraken dropped it in Ireland and Belgium in mid-2024, then across the European Economic Area in October 2024. Huobi had already started phasing out privacy coins in September 2022.
By 2025, the pace had accelerated. The article says about 73 exchanges removed Monero in that year alone, including Coinbase and Bitstamp.
The explanation given is not simply that regulators dislike privacy coins. The article points to the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, or MiCA, and comparable rules in other jurisdictions that require platforms to monitor transactions and meet Financial Action Task Force travel rule obligations once transfers exceed certain thresholds.
A coin that hides every transaction by default makes that kind of compliance close to impossible. Without a transparent fallback like Zcash, many regulated exchanges have chosen to delist it instead.
The report also stresses that holding Monero remains legal in many places, including the U.S., EU, UK, and Canada. Delistings are framed as exchange compliance decisions rather than government bans on the asset itself. It adds that usage has not collapsed as peer-to-peer and decentralized trading activity has remained firm.
Tracking attempts have not shown a break of the cryptography
Monero has long been a target for tracing efforts. The article says CipherTrace has publicly marketed “enhanced Monero tracing” to governments since 2020. It also says the Internal Revenue Service, or IRS, has paid more than $1 million in total to firms including Chainalysis and Integra FEC to build Monero attribution tools.
But the piece draws a line between attribution models and a cryptographic break. Those tools are described as probability models built from exchange records, IP metadata, and wallet seizures, not methods that decrypt Monero’s on-chain data. No analytics company, the article says, has published a genuine way to decode Monero transaction data directly. It also notes that an IRS bounty announced in 2020 for fully breaking Monero has never been fully claimed.
No company, no CEO, funding through CCS
Another defining feature is that Monero has no company behind it. The article says there is no entity comparable to Electric Coin Co or ZODL in the Zcash ecosystem, no board, and no CEO. Development is handled by a loose group of volunteer contributors, most of them pseudonymous, and that structure has remained largely unchanged since 2014.
So how does engineering get paid for? The answer is the Community Crowdfunding System, or CCS. Anyone can propose work on a public forum, and the community can fund it directly in XMR.
The report says CCS raised about $925,000 in 2025 alone. That money went to items including wallet development and network privacy research. Funds are held in escrow and released only after the work is delivered. The article adds that there is no venture capital backing, no token sale, and no corporate payroll supporting the project.
The structure comes with trade-offs. There is no single entity to subpoena, pressure, or blame in a governance dispute. On the other hand, there is also no company that can push out a fix quickly when something goes wrong. Decisions and funding move at the speed of community consensus.
The Qubic episode as a stress test
That model was tested in 2025. The article says a mining pool called Qubic was linked to Sergey Ivancheglo, a former IOTA co-founder. By mid-2025, Qubic’s hash power had climbed to about one quarter of Monero’s total network hash rate, and in August it publicly claimed majority control.
With no company or foundation coordinating an emergency response, miners organized an informal boycott of the pool. The article says Qubic’s share fell back within about a month, and no funds were stolen.
Market reaction was also telling in the author’s view. XMR fell when the initial announcement appeared, then recovered after the reorganization played out without losses. The piece presents that as a sign that the ecosystem still viewed Monero’s commitments as intact.
Monero and Zcash are making different bets
The article’s bottom line is that Monero and Zcash represent genuinely different bets. Monero chooses mandatory, uncompromising privacy and a purist technical path. Zcash chooses an optional model that is easier for regulators and exchanges to work with.
The author says Monero remains the hardest-line privacy option in crypto on technical grounds, especially after the January 2026 FCMP++ upgrade. At the same time, the pressures are real: XMR remains about 50% below its January high, its decentralized mining design has just been stress-tested by the Qubic episode, and the exchange delisting trend shows no sign of reversing.
Zcash, in contrast, is presented as the more pragmatic path. The closing question is whether Monero’s technical edge can offset its shrinking accessibility, or whether a more compromised but more reachable design will prove more durable over time. The article leaves that unresolved.
