'LocalMonero' wants buying Monero to be even more anonymous.

Monero is a cryptocurrency that aims to be more anonymous than Bitcoin, and has become a recent favorite of the online drug trade. Unlike Bitcoin transactions, Monero trades aren't plainly viewable on a public ledger. But to purchase Monero, you may have to first use Bitcoin, leaving a clear digital trail.

What if you could buy Monero offline, with cash, in a public place like a library or a restaurant? That would make Monero transactions much more anonymous, save for the person you're meeting.

A new site called LocalMonero—its launch was announced on Friday on Reddit—facilitates these types of transactions between people all over the world. While the site's founders are based in Hong Kong, listings offering Monero for cash from all over Canada, the US, the UK, and the United Arab Emirates, have already popped up on the site. The site also allows users to use bank transfers or other payment methods, if they wish.

LocalMonero is inspired by the long-running site LocalBitcoins, which also facilitates cash transactions for Bitcoin. However, LocalBitcoins tracks visitors' IP addresses, which can reveal their location, and requires an email for sign-up. Other methods of trading Monero, such as on a cryptocurrency exchange, may require you to reveal your identity. According to one of LocalMonero's founders, whom I interviewed via encrypted chat and who goes by "Alex," their site does none of this.

"Monero's defining feature is privacy, so going through ID/address verification kind of nullifies the point of using Monero unless you're just using it as a speculative asset," Alex wrote to me. "There's no point for us to collect more information than we need to run the platform. And Monero users will value that more than most."

When Monero is mentioned, drug markets on the darknet aren't far behind. This is because of its privacy-boosting features. There is a public blockchain, but transactions are obfuscated. One-time addresses are the default for transactions and newly sent funds are mixed in with old ones to hide their origin. It's worth noting that researchers have claimed that it's possible to de-anonymize some Monero transactions. Last year, AlphaBay, one of the biggest drug markets at the time added Monero as a payment option.