Before I go deeper into technical details regarding important aspects of Carrot with further posts, I present you, as something like an "interlude", a history of Monero privacy technologies. One aim is to show you how we arrived at the point where we are now with FCMP++ and Carrot. It's also an already quite long and IMHO interesting history that is worth to be told as part of this post series. (You find part 1 here.)

CryptoNote pure (2014)

Monero started a new blockchain in 2014 with code forked from Bytecoin, initially running unmodified CryptoNote technology as far as "privacy tech" was concerned.

Stealth addresses were already hiding receivers, in the same way they still are today. Ring signatures were already hiding, or better obfuscating, senders. The [ring size](https://www.getmonero.org/resources/

Why this post

A lot of interesting things go on right now in Monero development, but if you don't happen to attend the two regular dev meetings on Mondays and Wednesdays or hang around in some of our Matrix rooms, you probably wouldn't know much about it. We have a blog on our website here, but you won't find regular reports there like other cryptocurrency projects publish in their "dev blogs". So far nobody posts regular updates on Reddit either.

I only recently became fully aware of this, and noticed that people building software "on top" of the Monero core software, especially wallet apps, often don't seem to be fully informed either what is coming. This may have unfortunate consequences, e.g. apps not being ready when the next hardfork arrives because their authors were not aware about necessary changes, or became aware too late.

That's why I decided to write this post about Carrot, which is mostly "flying under the radar" so far, but will