At the moment, Monero’s market cap stands over $3.5 billion, keeping it among the top fifty cryptocurrencies on the market. Of course, the market’s behavior continues to fluctuate rapidly. Still, any experienced investor would see Monero as an attractive long-term investment considering its performance versus all the thousands of other altcoins.

However, long-term investments cannot be made on the basis of financial analyses alone, at least in this market. There’s more to cryptocurrency than the shifting values of its coins. That said, Monero offers a lot more than just its coins. It would not hurt to start early with a Monero wallet to plan out investments in XMR coins.

Read on to learn about what makes Monero a promising altcoin, especially compared to everything else on the market.

More Difficult to Centralize

One of the biggest selling points of the entire crypto industry is its decentralized nature. That means no government, financial institution, or corporate entity has singular power over the circulation of cryptocurrencies. However, this may only be temporary while the market is still young. The issue lies in cryptocurrencies being based on proof-of-power (PoW) mechanisms.

Loosely speaking, these are algorithms performed by users’ computers to validate transactions for a specific coin while also mining more coins in the process. While anyone with a computer and a good GPU can do this, most popular coins make use of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). These ASICs are built to be more effective at performing these algorithms.

Basically, a company could hoard a lot of ASICs for a single coin, mining a majority stake over all the coins within a cryptocurrency. To combat this, Monero utilizes a more complex algorithm called RandomX. It’s not only optimized for CPUs instead of GPUs, but it causes potential ASICs to be inefficient. The computing power costs would outweigh the value of coins they mine.

Essentially, all users on Monero’s network have practically equal opportunities to mine and to earn XMR coins. Any group or institution would be hard-pressed to try monopolizing Monero.

An Active Community

Speaking of users, all the technology and cryptographical advancements behind Monero can be attributed to the community. Because the altcoin is open-source, anyone is free to access the coin’s code. They can easily help in fixing issues, improving its protocols, and suggesting innovations to the coin.

In fact, the joint efforts of many users are the reason why Monero’s privacy features and user protections are as strong as they are today. Many of the hard forks in recent years have set it largely apart from even the most popular cryptocurrencies. Other than a unique codebase, the community has made Monero’s features built into the coins themselves.

These advancements are only set to continue as the user base on the Monero network grows larger.

All about Privacy and Security

In the digital age, practically everything is online. With that, the biggest concern for people around the world is privacy. They do not want their most sensitive data being violated, accessed, or stolen by strangers. What makes this more frightening is how powerful corporate entities who gain access to your data can sell it to advertisers for profit.

For these reasons, Monero has made privacy and security the core feature of its cryptocurrency more than anything else. A selling point of cryptocurrencies is their lack of regulation, but that means having no one to intervene when things go wrong. That leaves users putting all their trust into the technology throughout every transaction.

Primarily through advanced ring signatures, XMR coins are programmed to prevent traceability to any of its users. That means that only two parties—the sender and receiver—in a transaction are aware of their involvement. For any potential intruders, the coin presents several dummy keys to obscure the true keys performing the transaction.

Confidence in Its Fungibility

Unlike Monero, most other cryptocurrencies are traceable. Their respective blockchains provide easy access to users’ past transactions, exchanges, and purchases. In other words, anyone can find out where each coin has been and how it has been used.

This may prevent potential vendors who accept cryptocurrency to reject transactions from certain individuals on the basis of their consumer activity. This renders those users’ altcoins worthless since they cannot be exchanged for goods, services, and even fiat money. They basically cannot spend their money.

The privacy and anonymity of Monero protects its users from falling under this scrutiny. While it is not impossible to trace their history, the altcoin’s technology makes this extremely difficult and tedious to do. This practically guarantees that a user’s XMR coins will always be accepted when engaging in any exchanges and purchases.

Hopefully these insights have been helpful in understanding how much lies ahead for Monero. It offers a lot for its users and what the future of finance could look like. Of course, it is still important to take careful precautions and considerations before making any investment. Nevertheless, it would not hurt to consider it for one’s investment portfolio.