Monero XMR has just recorded another historical high at $57.6 on Poloniex earlier today. Monero which is one of the totally anonymous cryptocurrencies has been on a bullish run since the beginning of the year. In January, one Monero coin was worth around $13, so it rose by around 320% in less than 5 months. So, where will we go from here? Will Monero price continue on rising? or will we witness a steep nosedive as speculators sell their coins for profit?

Throughout our”The most promising cryptocurrencies to buy in 2017” article, we expected Monero to be among the top gainers in 2017 and we predicted its price to reach the $50 mark before the end of the year; however, I never expected this to happen before even the first half of the year ends.

Now Monero XMR Values $57, Is This Its Real Value?

Well, the answer to this question can be quite tricky. Let’s first highlight the uniqueness of Monero as compared to bitcoin and other cryptos:

Monero’s transaction are totally anonymous; thanks to its CryptoNote algorithm and ring signatures. In economics, this means that Monero promotes real “fungibility”. Some believe that if a currency isn’t totally fungible, then it isn’t real money. Monero is resistant to ASIC miners, oppositely to bitcoin. This means that ordinary PCs can mine Monero; thus, support the network by verifying transactions and earn their users some Monero coins. This ensures that Monero’s network will continue on growing, adding more nodes and strengthening the protocol. Monero’s blockchain is designed to produce a block every 2 minutes and the protocol is formulated to automatically have an adaptive block size, so we can never see bitcoin’s scalability problems with Monero. Integration of the invisible internet project (I2P) is under development, which will increase the protocol’s security by shielding the network against passive network snooping, so in the future, not only will your Monero transactions be anonymous, but also attackers will not even know that you are using Monero.

Due to all of these reasons, I believe that Monero’s value is even much more than what we have already witnessed. Practically speaking, Monero is a cryptocurrency that addresses many of the problems associated with bitcoin’s protocol, mainly privacy and scalability. As such, I won’t be surprised to see Monero’s price exceed $100 by the end of the year and in the long run, it can even surpass bitcoin’s.

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Chart from Poloniex, hosted on Tradingview.com