Short answers, pulled from the story.
Monero is a blockchain-based cryptocurrency that is private, untraceable, fungible, and decentralized, traded under the ticker XMR. It obfuscates transaction details by default, though users can share view keys to allow third-party auditing.
Monero was created in 2014, when a group of Bitcointalk forum users forked the BitMonero project after disagreeing with its original developer, thankful_for_today. The underlying CryptoNote v2 concept had been described a year earlier in a white paper published in October 2013 by Nicolas van Saberhagen.
Monero obscures transactions using ring signatures, which group a sender's outputs with decoy outputs, along with Ring Confidential Transactions, Bulletproofs, and stealth addresses for recipients. It also uses the Dandelion++ protocol to hide the IP address of the device broadcasting a transaction.
Monero's privacy features made it the dominant cryptocurrency on darknet markets, where anonymity is critical for both buyers and sellers. By 2025, nearly half of newly launched darknet markets operated exclusively with Monero, following law enforcement's growing success at tracing bitcoin and stablecoins.
Monero uses RandomX, a proof-of-work algorithm introduced in November 2019 to replace the earlier CryptoNightR algorithm. Both algorithms were designed to resist application-specific integrated circuit mining, allowing Monero to be mined on consumer hardware such as x86, x86-64, ARM processors, and GPUs.
Yes, exchanges including Binance and exchanges in South Korea and Australia have delisted Monero. Binance delisted Monero on the 20th of February 2024, citing regulatory compliance.