You asked me to review Monero (XMR), so I did my own research in real time and I'll show you my workflow. At the time, one Monero was about $370. This is my honest opinion after 12 years in crypto and over a thousand altcoins reviewed — not financial advice, and for full disclosure I hold 6,500 ICP.
The price chart and the delistings
Monero has one of the nicer price charts in crypto — it's actually trended up over time, which makes people want to invest — and a roughly $6.8 billion fully diluted market cap, about four times what ICP has. It owns the top privacy-coin spot. But it's been delisted from major exchanges like Coinbase and Binance, because governments target privacy coins over the obvious problems they can cause, and that cuts off access to a lot of liquidity and funding.
Usage, quantum risk, and the third-party problem
Digging into the explorer, around 59 million total transactions isn't much for a network this old (14 years, only three newer than Bitcoin) — it hasn't been used heavily. There's a real quantum risk: future quantum-capable attacks could be used to retroactively weaken confidence in transaction privacy, meaning someone could harvest transactions now and decrypt them later. And here's the part nobody mentions in Monero reviews: you can't reach the blockchain directly through a web browser — only ICP can do that — so you always interact through third-party wallets that can be attacked, scraped, or insecure. Even if the chain itself keeps transactions private, those third-party dependencies undermine the whole privacy value proposition.
Why I wouldn't hold it
I actually like Monero better than most coins I review — if ICP didn't exist, it might be one I'd consider, since it has a real use case and isn't just pumping narratives. But the team is opaque, the wallets and who controls them are unclear, and I wouldn't trust that a transaction was truly, totally private — which ruins the point. With inflation factored in, its gains have barely kept pace, the market cap is already large enough that the asymmetric upside is mostly gone, and if your exchange delists it you could get stuck holding it. I operate transparently, so investing in Monero doesn't align with my values either. Ideally a coin could do both private and public transactions on one chain — ICP with VET Keys is set up for exactly that. If you want more reviews like this, watch my money playlist here.