What are Ring Signatures in Monero?

Monero is one of the most liquid and earliest cryptocurrencies. While Ethereum and Bitcoin have considerable market share, leaders in their category, Monero, choose privacy coins.

The platform is designed to be completely anonymous. As such, transactions cannot be traced by third parties, protecting the identity of the recipient and sender.

To enable this feature, Monero employs various transaction concealing techniques. Ring Signatures is one of them.

Ring Signatures in Monero do protect the privacy of the sender without allowing double-spending. Monero does this by bringing together a group of signers, including the original signer—that is, the sender-- to produce a unique signature approving the transaction. The combination of the signer and non-signers produces a ring since all of them are considered valid and equal. Only the signer's input corresponds with the output. At the same time, the non-signers are previous transaction outputs pulled from the Monero blockchain acting as decoys. 

This way, Monero can effectively mask the transaction's origin by ensuring that inputs appear equal, making it near impossible for third parties to trace them.