Future developments in Monero XMR: a projected roadmap (or: why Monero is still undervalued)

As the recent week in March 2017 led to a hype of not only DASH ($100) and Ether ($30), we also saw a rise of the anonymous cryptocurrency Monero (XMR) to hit $20 on its USDT/XMR pair on poloniex. While some people argue that this status already represents a high value I will bring a few other arguments, why Monero still is undervalued. See also another writeup from brandon-rosano on Steemit, which gives a few backgrounds I am not going too deep into.

It is the only mandatory anonymous cryptocurrency in use
There is DASH and ZCASH, both of which claim to be coins focusing on anonymity (see also: an article on bitcoin.com on this topic). This is true, but only to some extent: DASH largely based on the work of so called 'masternodes', which essentially provide coin mixing services, almost similar to what Tor offers for anonymous browsing. The only caveat is, that it is largely dependent on the masternodes not being compromised - so if a possible attacker can gain enough masternodes up, chances of them tracing the transactions are growing. On the example of ZCASH (ZEC), the problem resides in the optional anonymity: there there still is no implementation of the ZK-SNARKS that works in a reasonable amount of time (or on low-end hardware for that matter), anonymity is optional in ZCASH. So you can make anonymous transactions, but only from desktop clients. As the crypto wars (see PGP and Phil Zimmerman) in the 1990s showed, optional encryption always means low entropy. So in the sector of anonymous coins, Monero definitely has an advantage, since Monero has mandatory anonymity.

The (real) monero roadmap is not public
While all the other coins, such as DASH, ZCASH and Ether have an actual roadmap with all events laid out, Monero and its developer-driven community is rather secretive about steps and future developments - especially exactly when specific developments will be introduced (see the Monero design and development goals). Some see this as a negative point, while others (mostly devs) see this as a sign of credibility and dub these facts with "Monero is not following the hype". Its for you to decide what you think about the facts.

Monero has no active PR
Monero has a quite strong anti-PR going, which is evident in various posts (see: reddit). This fact is especially interesting, as due to the increased interest in XMR on the markets, it shows that the interest is not hype-driven, but actually based on developments and innovations such as ringCT, which already got adopted (or is planned to be adopted) into other cryptocurrencies (e.g. Boolberry).

Monero has very interesting side projects
The monero project (see: github)not only involves the cryptocurrency itself, but also features other interesting side-projects: Kovri, an I2P Router Project which is an C++ implementation of the I2P anonymous network. Unique Ring Signatures (URS) is another sideproject, which allows to send binaries and text anonymously among a group of users. The external project Crypto-Kingdom is a MMORPG - a massive multiplayer online role playing game based on the currency. The side projects clearly show that the Monero developer community has a set of modular developments, which are not only relevant to monero-core or to the currency, but also show a developer-driven/design-driven architecture. This points to the fact, that Monero will be there for quite some time, and will not face sudden death, such as Bytecoin (premine), cryptonite (dev abandon), etc.

Future projected roadmap
More wallets will come soon
Monero still needs open source mobile wallets, as there are only closed-source ones available to this date (see a discussion on Stack Exchange). JAXX Wallet announced a wallet, but reverted their decisions soon after. We will see a few more efforts and also new wallets appear throughout the next months.

Monero GUI Beta 2 is due the next days
Monero GUI Beta 1 was already a very huge step for the Monero project, as it brought a full wallet and GUI to the desktop for the first time. According to the developers, Monero GUI Beta 2 will be released in the coming days.

While a lot of traders and observers are awaiting the crash of the DASH rise ($100 as of writing this article), it is also speculated, that Monero will benefit from people coming from ZCASH or other currently hyped coins (ETH?). We will see what the future will bring, but in my opinion XMR is still undervalued by a huge amount, and we might see a projected $30-$40 in the coming month, especially since new announcements are imminent.