How It Works
Monero combines three cryptographic mechanisms for comprehensive privacy: Ring Signatures mix a sender's transaction with 15 decoy 'ring members' from past transactions, making the real sender statistically indistinguishable from decoys; Stealth Addresses generate one-time addresses for every transaction so the recipient's public address never appears on-chain; RingCT (Ring Confidential Transactions) uses Pedersen commitments to hide transaction amounts while proving they are non-negative and sum correctly. RandomX is Monero's ASIC-resistant PoW algorithm optimized for commodity CPUs, designed to favor democratic participation in mining. The Bulletproofs+ upgrade significantly reduced transaction size and verification time.
Consensus Mechanism: Proof of Work (RandomX)
Proof of Work consensus requires miners to expend computational energy to propose new blocks. The miner who finds a valid block hash first broadcasts it to the network and earns the block reward. This creates an objective, energy-backed security model where attacking the network costs real-world resources.
Key Architecture Facts
| Category | Privacy |
| Consensus | Proof of Work (RandomX) |
| Launched | 2014 |
| Founder | Riccardo Spagni |