By Max Bibeau | USA

While 2017 has undoubtedly been the year of Bitcoin, with prices skyrocketing tens of thousands of dollars, 2018 may have different surprises in store. What really made 2017 important for Bitcoin, is that it became a household name. Instead of being a niche, nerdy technology, it became something that grandparents texted their kids about asking how to get involved.

2018 will absolutely bring more name recognition and price rockets for Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin may not be the biggest winner. Monero may see huge gains, both in price and adoption, as Bitcoin continues to face centralization issues and high fees.

Monero, founded in 2014, prides itself on being the most private, decentralized currency on the market. It is currently listed 8th by market cap, at about 3,800,000,000 USD. Its price is about $250 at the time of writing.

Monero treats privacy as the most important factor for a successful cryptocurrency – and as legislation continues to be proposed to Congress regarding the legality of cryptocurrencies, this could be very important. Monero assures users that they use the “latest and most resilient encryption tools available” in order to ensure all transactions are as anonymous as possible.

With a current supply of 15,449,232 XMR, it’s also incredibly undervalued compared to currencies like Bitcoin. It also has an interesting system regarding the total supply. Instead of capping at 21 million coins like Bitcoin, once 18.3 million XMR are in circulation, Monero will only be created at a rate of about 0.3 XMR per minute. This is meant to ensure miners continue to profit. In this scenario, the first year that the original Monero supply runs out, only about 1% of the existing supply will be introduced into the circulating supply. And every year after that, the percentage will continue to decrease, but never reach zero. This ensures that unlike Bitcoin, Monero miners won’t have to raise fees in order to turn a profit after the maximum supply runs out.

2017 was already a solid year for Monero – going from $13.79 in January to now peaking at $278.66 this year. The graph follows similarly the graph of Bitcoin in its 2014 years.

Even outside of price, Monero has seen increasing adoption this year, and it will likely increase next year as well. Black market dealers have started to catch on to Monero’s anonymity and have begun accepting it often. This is extremely important, as the black market is where Bitcoin got its start as well. It’s only a matter of time before white and grey market shops begin to adapt as well.

So, while 2017 was the year of Bitcoin, it’s likely that 2018 will be known as the year of Monero.