90% Of Monero Has Already Been Mined

By Rishma Banerjee

Monero Blocks a monitoring resource, confirmed on December 20th, that all of Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency will be mined by May of 2022, as miners have already extracted 90 percent of its reserves. The total cap of the ultimate supply of the cryptocurrency is 18.4 million XMR, where only a total of 16,659,407 XMR is available as of now. The developers of Monero emphasize the importance of anonymity and the untethered usage of coins, viewing them as priorities.

Monero will also have a feature called the “tail emission” due to which, it will continue to generate tiny 0.6 XMR block rewards infinitely after 2022 unlike Bitcoin (BTC) whose supply is fixed once all the coins have been mined. This feature, according to reference bank Moneropedia will preserve the incentive amongst the miners to ensure that the security of the network is preserved. They stated:

“Because of the dynamic blocksize, competition between miners will cause fees to decrease. If mining is not profitable due to a high cost and low reward, miners lose their incentive and will stop mining, reducing the security of the network. Tail emission ensures that a dynamic block size and fee market can develop.”

However, in spite of this feature, it is highly unlikely that Monero will transform into a cryptocurrency that is inflationary. That is mainly due to the technically unlimited issuance of 0.6 XMR per block. Lost or burned coins will likely equal more than the block reward within the same period. Though there was a massive controversy with regards to this tail emission figure during the hard fork, that took place this year, Monero has managed to stave off negative publicity, even if their insistence on anonymity has made it a firm favorite of hackers, cybercriminals, and other such people who are involved in illegal activities.