The Monero Moon is a curated weekly newsletter regarding all things Monero. The Monero Moon has returned for a short period. Enjoy.

April 28th 2021

Development, Releases, and Technology

On the 18th of April 2021, Monero celebrated its 7th birthday! View the first block ever mined here at xmrchain.net.

Monero turned 7 years old. Image credit: Wataru_Watanabe

The Comit Network, one of the groups responsible for the development of XMR-BTC atomic swaps, made a pull request to add support for atomic swapping through Tor.

Monero GUI v0.17.2.1 ‘Oxygen Orion’, the official Monero wallet, has been released. This is the CLI & GUI v0.17.2.1 ‘Oxygen Orion’ minor release.This release predominantly features bug fixes and performance improvements. Users are recommended to upgrade to improve user experience. Check this link for more information or download links.

Members of the Monero Mining subreddit community highlighted that mining Monero is the most profitable it’s been in the last 12 months, and the most profitable since the RandomX fork 17 months ago.

Monero Mining Profitability — credit u/MoneroMon

The number of miners on the Monero network has broken through the 100k barrier which is a new all time high. The Monero network has added about 10k miners in under 2 weeks. Visit miningpoolstats.stream/monero and then zoom the page out in your browser to see the number of miners.

The minexmr.com mining pool continues to harness a large majority of XMR hashrate. At the time of writing, minexmr.com currently has ~39% of known hashrate. Miners are urged to stop mining to minexmr.com in order to ensure and build a decentralised global network. A list of alternate mining pools can be found at miningpoolstats.stream/monero.

Seth Simmons highlighted that Monero has now surpassed 10% of Bitcoin’s transaction volume. Head over to the awesome website moneroj.net or click this link for view the graph yourself.

mj provided their second report as a Monero developer. Read the report here.

A BTC/XMR atomic swap was performed via testnet & stagenet using COMIT Network’s PoC and Samourai Wallet’s backend. More information regarding this transaction and XMR/BTC atomic swaps can be found here.

Coding Jesus aka Agorist-Action, a past contributor to Bitmex research, published a YouTube video outlining his contribution to the Monero Project over a four month period. The video includes a discussion as to why he decided to dedicate time to this project, and how the library works, and includes an actual code example at the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siCxVw_rb9U

THORchain’s (a cross-chain decentralised liquidity network) implementation of Monero is almost complete. See the below tweet.

Finally, this is a reminder that verifying the supply of Monero is trivial, as demonstrated by a Monero contributor last year.

General News

To celebrate and show the growth that has happened for Monero throughout the past year, Seth Simmons shared a detailed blog post titled This Year in Monero — 2021. This is a must read, and highlights the numerous data points, including Transactions, Blockchain Growth, Emissions, Fees, and Mining.

Monero Outreach published an informative article about Atomic Swaps. “Better Monero trading is coming, thanks to atomic swaps. With atomic swaps, online users trade cryptocurrencies without needing to trust each other or anyone else.” Read the full article here.

Getmonero.org has been updated which includes Performance improvements, new blog posts, a new ‘Cheatsheets’ section, a lot of improvements and fixes, and much more. For a detailed breakdown on updates check out this Reddit post by ErCiccione.

Gingeropolous shared a lengthy and detailed post titled Why Monero? Check it out over on the r/cryptocurrency subreddit.

Monero is on the rise again on Google Trends. This could be the start of Monero regaining mainstream cryptospace popularity. Go see for yourself here.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=monero

The Monero Outreach Workgroup shared this infographic about Monero. Check it out here.

Blockgeeks also published this Monero infographic.

Monero is now live on TxStreet! TxStreet is a cryptocurrency blockchain live transaction visualizer. Every tx is a person, and they fill up buses which represent blocks. Go check it out here.

Sputniknews.com published an article titled Former CIA Acting Director Praises Bitcoin Technology as ‘Boon for Surveillance’. It discusses how Bitcoin and the technology behind it should be embraced by governments since it is a “boon for surveillance.”

Bleeping Computer reported that The REvil ransomware gang (who also recently hacked Acer requesting payment in XMR) asked Apple to “buy back” stolen product blueprints to avoid having them leaked on REvil’s leak site and requested XMR as payment. According to Bleeping Computer, REvil tried to extort Apple only after Quanta Computer, a leading notebook manufacturer and one of Apple’s business partners, refused to communicate with the ransomware gang or pay the ransom demanded after they allegedly stole “a lot of confidential data” from Quanta’s network.

TAEYYO shared a Monero focused YouTube video titled Monero: The Cryptocurrency for Human Rights. Watch it here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXwm3Xu4S6g

Chainalysis is now directly selling its blockchain data for marketing purposes. As stated on their website: “At Chainalysis we trace the cryptocurrency funds flowing to and from your entire customer base on the blockchain. We then provide context around the transaction data by labeling the addresses with the real-world entities that control them. Our ability to see the source and the outgoing flow of funds translates these transactions into interactions and enables us to supply you with data that delivers answers to multiple functions across your organization — not just for compliance.”

Douglas Tuman of Monero Talk recently interviewed Aleksandar Svetski, CEO of Amber and a self declared Supreme Bitcoin Extreme Maxi. In this episode Aleksander discussed why he is a next level maxi and his rationale for why it is OK that bitcoin is and always will be transparent at the core protocol level.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_BMXgPXhMM

Exchanges and Merchants

Online clothes retailer NackCollective.com now accepts Monero. Check them out and show them some support here.

Want to buy or sell something for XMR? Head over to r/moneromarket and browse things for sale, or sell something of your own.

LiteLiger provided a LocalMonero.co review. LocalMonero allows P2P, no KYC trading. Watch the review below.

Local Monero Review — P2P Trading / No KYC

Community Crowdfunding System

Cypher Stack’s Triptych multisig research CCS proposal recently opened for funding with the full amount promptly raised within a day. The goal of this proposal is to do further research into Triptych’s multisig options.

There are a number of other Community Crowdfunding System proposals awaiting feedback and discussion. This includes proposals for GUI wallet development,The Monero Moon newsletter, a marketplace, and wallet translations, The proposals can be viewed here.

Trading & Speculation

Monero is marching towards its all time high price of $478 USDT on Poloniex, and is primed for its highest ever monthly close.

Brave New Coin provided recent XMR commentary and price analysis. This is a great video to watch for an overview of Monero in terms of performance.

Monero Price Analysis — 23rd April 2021

Check out this tweet from BitcoinGuru for an XMR Mega Bull ATH prediction of $4000–15000USD by the end of the year!

https://twitter.com/BitcoinGuruHQ/status/1385772954596741122/photo/3

Performance

Move over Dogecoin, Monero hit $420 on 4/20!

Total Monero in Circulation — 17,897,168 XMR

Monero Total Marketcap — $7,590,117,555 USD

Monero Coinmarketcap Ranking — #21

XMR/USD Price — $424 USD

XMR/BTC Price — 0.0078 BTC

LocalMonero.co Street Price — $433 USD

Average Transaction Fee — 0.000015 XMR ($0.0063 USD)

Hashrate — 2.24 Ghash/s

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-hashrate.html#1y

Monero Mining Pools Hashrate Distribution —

Entertainment

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/mx4335/could_someone_explain_possibly_every_detail_of/

https://www.reddit.com/r/moonero/comments/mxrjvj/few/

https://www.reddit.com/r/moonero/comments/mxt7jg/oc/

Bear Market (Monero OG) Music Video

Monero — Freedom is our Right

Donate

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Scan the QR Code to donate XMR to The Monero Moon

Support Monero

Want to help contribute to the Monero Project? Developers, marketers, event coordinators, translators, Instagram personalities, meme creators, public speakers — whatever your skills may be, it is extremely likely there is something you can do to assist. I urge you to reach out to the Monero community on Reddit, IRC, GitHub, Twitter, or Telegram.

Past Issues

Past issues can be found here: Issue 14 / Issue 13 / Issue 12 / Issue 11 / Issue 10 / Issue 9 / Issue 8 / Issue 7 / Issue 6 / Issue 5 / Issue 4 / Issue 3 / Issue 2 / Issue 1

If you have any suggestions, corrections, or feedback, please contact me on Twitter @johnfoss69 or on Reddit u/johnfoss68.

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DISCLAIMER: This publication contains opinion for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Information may contain errors and omissions. Use solely at your own risk. The author of this publication and/or the authors of articles linked to from this site may have financial investments that may bias their opinions, including ownership of Monero currency. Always do your own research, form your own opinions, and never take risks with money or trust third parties with out verifying their credibility.

The Monero Moon

The Monero Moon (Issue 15)