Who created Monero and when was it launched?
Monero was launched on April 18, 2014, by someone using the online name thankful_for_today. Their real identity is not publicly known, and although they started the project, Monero soon became a community-led effort rather than a currency controlled by one founder.
The person behind the launch
The most accurate answer to “who created Monero?” is thankful_for_today, the name used by the person who introduced it publicly. This was a pseudonym: an online identity that did not reveal the person’s real name.
That distinction matters because you may see other well-known Monero contributors described as its creators. Some played major roles in developing or maintaining the project later, but that is different from launching it.
You do not need to know the founder’s real identity to understand the basic history. What is publicly established is the launch date, the name used by the original creator, and the software on which the project was based.
It first appeared as BitMonero
At launch, the project was called BitMonero. The name combined “Bit,” familiar from Bitcoin, with “monero,” the Esperanto word for “coin.”
Shortly after launch, the community shortened the name to Monero. So if you come across an early discussion about BitMonero, you are reading about the beginnings of the same project—not a separate predecessor that later sold or transferred its name.
A simple way to remember the sequence is:
- April 18, 2014: thankful_for_today launched BitMonero.
- Soon afterward: the community adopted the shorter name Monero.
- As development continued: responsibility spread among contributors rather than staying with the original creator.
Its software roots were in Bytecoin
Monero began as a fork of Bytecoin. Here, “fork” means developers took an existing project’s source code—the instructions that make its software work—and used it as the starting point for a separate currency.
This was a code fork, not a split that gave existing Bytecoin holders matching Monero balances. Monero started its own blockchain, the shared record of its transactions.
Bytecoin used CryptoNote, a set of rules and cryptographic methods designed for privacy-focused digital money. Monero inherited that technical foundation and developed it further.
So there are three different roles to keep separate: CryptoNote supplied the underlying design, Bytecoin supplied the codebase Monero started from, and thankful_for_today launched Monero itself.
The bottom line
If you want one name and one date, remember thankful_for_today — April 18, 2014. The project launched as BitMonero, grew from Bytecoin’s CryptoNote-based code, and soon became community-led. That gives you the origin without confusing its original launcher with the many people who helped build Monero afterward.
