This week, the developers of Monero (XMR) patched a bug that could allow an attacker to ‘burn’ the funds of an organization’s wallet. The breach was initially revealed by a community member, and XMR developers were quick enough to fix it before any damage was done.
Simply put, Monero (XMR) is a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin (BTC), but with an additional focus on anonymity. It was established in 2014, when bitcointalk.org user thankful_for_today forked the codebase of Bytecoin into the name BitMonero. To establish the new coin, he used ideas that were first outlined in a 2013 white paper called ‘Cryptonote’ that was written by an anonymous personality Nicolas van Saberhagen. Ironically, BitMonero was soon forked itself by open-source developers, and titled ‘Monero’ (which means ‘coin’ in Esperanto). It has remained to be an open-source project ever since.