Monero was created in 2014 as a fork of a project called “Bytecoin” by a small community of developers. 

Monero is not a fork of Bitcoin, and uses an entirely new codebase called “Cryptonote” that has evolved into the Monero protocol. 

Monero was started with three core aims – privacy that is usable and approachable for the masses, by default, a scalable and iterating base-layer, and ASIC-resistance to enable commodity hardware mining which aids decentralization.

Monero enables this default privacy for all users of the network through a variety of means:
—RingCT: this technology hides all amounts sent and received on-chain (via Confidential Transactions), as well as hides which output is actually being spent among (currently) 10 others (via ring signatures). This requires no coordination and is completely non-interactive (unlike CoinJoin) and happens entirely via the protocol itself.
—Stealth addresses: this technology hides sender and receiver addresses on-chain by letting the sender generate a one-time address using the receiver’s public key, so no actual addresses are ever published to the blockchain.
—Dandelion++: This technology helps to hide the sender’s IP address when sending Monero by using a special method of relaying transactions to other nodes.