Monero has the third largest developer community among cryptocurrencies, behind bitcoin and Ethereum. Its privacy features have attracted cypherpunks and users desiring privacy measures not provided in other cryptocurrencies. It is increasingly used in illicit activities such as money laundering, darknet markets, ransomware, and cryptojacking. The United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has posted bounties for contractors that can develop monero tracing technologies.

Monero is hardly the sole exclusive and ultimate choice for all cases in privacy coin technology, neither today, nor tomorrow. There are now many privacy coins in prod beyond the early Zcash-ZEC and Monero-XMR and even Bitcoin_Cash-BCH+CashFusion forms and their progenitors and derivatives, and many more in devel, and more beyond that to come in 3rd, 4th, Nth generations beyond the 2nd gen phase being produced today. The same for the various cross-coin anonymous DEX, the shifters, mixes, swaps, joinmarket, etc. For that matter, most coins carrying any serious amount of value today have dire first generation problems with some aspect of scalability, privacy, disk space, txrate, etc. The more adoption they get, the less they can change, the closer they grow to point of maxed out unusability. And when that approaches, and without having developed real cross-coin anonymous DEX, you're value is stuck and fucked. Coin tech is still very early days, anyone claiming otherwise or parading around just one coin, is a shill.