Which cryptocurrency was launched in 2014 as BitMonero?

Monero was launched in 2014 as BitMonero.

Monero is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency whose mainnet launched on April 18, 2014. Its earliest name was BitMonero, combining “Bit,” as in Bitcoin, with “Monero,” an Esperanto word meaning “coin.” Within days, the community shortened the name to Monero. The project grew from the CryptoNote protocol, which emphasized transaction privacy and differed technically from Bitcoin.

Monero’s privacy system is built into ordinary transactions by default. Ring signatures obscure the sender among decoy outputs, stealth addresses help conceal the recipient, and Ring Confidential Transactions hide transaction amounts. These features are intended to make transactions difficult to trace and to support fungibility, meaning units are not supposed to acquire different reputations based on their previous history.

Verge, Dash and Zcash are also associated with privacy features, which can make the choices look interchangeable. They are separate cryptocurrencies with different origins and designs. Another common mistake is assuming Monero is simply a Bitcoin clone; it instead originated from CryptoNote-based code and was launched after a community split from the original BitMonero direction.