The problem with monero is that it is not used much as a currency
https://getmonero.org/getting-started/merchants the same thing happened to peercoin, hardly used for anything besides speculation.
It is hardly profitable for me to mine it desipite having 2x r9 290 and it is likely to get even worse as the blockreward continues to decrease, i am afraid the coin will end up in the hands of botnets.
Not used much as a currency? Did you miss all the post where people are talking about buying things with xmr.to? To make it short in that sense every shop that accepts bitcoin also accepts monero.
That was the main marketing innovation I saw from Monero's ecosystem. Even someone used that once to fund me.
It is befitting that Shapeshift.io copied you, given one of the threats Monero used to make when ever I would explain I wanted to work on my own experiments, was they being open source could just copy any thing that was valuable.
Btw, I was pitching the conceptual idea of XMR.to back in 2013 on BCT. It was one of the rebuttals I had for the Bitcoin maximalists. And yet again one of my ideas becomes a blockbuster success. You think I don't have a lot more of those ideas in my back pocket.