Monero is now the 5th largest crypto token in the world by market value, with a total market value over $110M. In the past 24 hours it sailed past Steem, Ethereum Classic, and Dash and is up 100%.
It's becoming difficult for even the most ardent follower of the space to keep track of all of the tokens so the goal here is to give anyone a high-level overview of Monero. I'm still a Monero noob but did a deep dive this weekend and here's what I learned:
Who created it?
The creator is Bitcointalk user Thankful_for_today. He forked Monero from Bytecoin another privacy-focused project. Bytecoin has a precarious history that involved a faked 2-year blockchain with an 80% premine. This anonymous Bitcointalk user didn't listen to anyone so the community took it over, after which the refused the offer to collaborate and disappeared.
The core dev team is now composed of 7 developers from around the world, 5 of which are anonymous, including our own whale 
What is the purpose?
The purpose is to provide users full transaction anonymity. It's well understood that Bitcoin is not a good tool for users that value anonymity . The Bitcoin blockchain reveals all transactions with an address and timestamp and it's possible for sophisticated data scientists to trace transactions to individuals. The Bitcoin blockchain was influential in helping the FBI track down the creator of Silk road, for example.
It's clear there's demand for a privacy-conscious alternative to Bitcoin as currently constructed, and Monero seeks to be that alternative.
What is the tech breakthrough (if anything)?
"Spontaneous Ring Signatures" is the tech breakthrough. The core devs wrote a white paper on it here.
A spontaneous ring signature is a digital signature that "specifies a group of possible signers such that the verifier can’t tell which member actually produced the signature.” This is a novel approach to doing confidential transactions. That said, there are many other projects attempting to implement similar concepts such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, and Dash.
What is the token supply?
Like Bitcoin, inflation decreases over time. Unlike Bitcoin, there is an infinite supply of XMR that will ever be created (see graph below). Once the total number of Monero reaches 18.3 million. then the rate of inflation will stop decreasing and stay at a constant rate of 0.3 Monero per minute.
What is driving the spike in price?
One of the largest darknet markets, Alphabay, has added Monero as a payment method. This has spurred a few mainstream media articles as well (see Wired here and Motherboard here).
As we've seen in Bitcoin, media attention drives short-term price in the early days, but long-term the fundamentals must reflect the price. For that reason, I'm sitting on the sidelines for now watching and learning.