I won't say that I've been the biggest Monero speculator this year, but I've lately found myself trying to familiarize myself with the community there and keeping up with events surrounding the project.
But given the absence of “chain-level” community platforms for that hence the need to rely on web2 socials to stay informed, this hasn't been the most eventful experience for me as an anti-social media person.
That said, it doesn't require much or active involvement with the community of Monero to know that 2024 wasn't its best year as it's been facing subtle attacks for being what it is — a privacy preserving cryptocurrency that actually works.
So much that firms like Chainanalysis have to take unethical steps simply to try and track users transacting on Monero.
But that wasn't the start of negative pr for Monero this year, it was rather the delisting news from Binance in February.
The Monero token, XMR’s price crashed by over 20% following the news and closed February at -16.5%.
Binance was only the start of events, more exchangers joined in delisting XMR in subsequent months but surprisingly, the currency is not dead.
The community turned every negative event into a marketing campaign to highlight why Monero matters and why the government is afraid of it, hence the bullying of exchanges to force the token off high liquidity markets and firms like Chainanalysis being tasked to try to break the financial privacy enforced by the blockchain.
Despite what was an obvious attack on Monero, the privacy blockchain’s native token, XMR has yet been the one crypto asset with the least volatility this year.
According to data from Cryptorank, Monero’s volatility is just 2%, evident in the token’s historical price actions, it's been the most stable fungible asset despite not being a stablecoin.
The Currency Bitcoin Could Not Be
Monero is everything bitcoin could not be. A not hyperinflationary token, but rather, a token with predictable inflation designed to effectively incentivize long-term network security whilst operating with the most privacy preserving tech in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
Certainly, bitcoin maxis do not like Monero, but it's a fool's errand to try to please bitcoin maxis, considering that they frankly hate everyone, which funny enough, just goes to prove an underlying insecurity about themselves.
I see a future for privacy blockchains like Monero leading the revolution of industries like web3 social. This is frankly one that I've had in my books to talk about.
Privacy-preserving blockchains can significantly change how we interact with each other on social networks and effectively improve the health of blockchain incentives. Blockchain clearly has something great going on for itself thanks to tokenization and through that, incentivization of network participants to eliminate misconduct.
Privacy blockchains I believe can take this to a whole new level by eliminating the one weakness that exists on the layer 0 of blockchain networks — the social layer discrimination — and hence hinders smoother operations due to cultural differences and belief systems.
The social layer requires privacy Tech to effectively scale. This is something I will be talking more about in the future as a potential alternative to current systems of social layer incentives structures across blockchain networks.