XMR · private by default · since 2014
What is Monero?
Monero (XMR) is open-source digital cash that hides the sender, the receiver and the amount of every payment by default, and is run by volunteers rather than by a company.
Illustrative only. Every Monero payment lands at a fresh address like this, used once and never again.
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Monero in 60 seconds
Cash for the internet, with the curtains drawn.
Most blockchains are glass houses: anyone can look up who paid whom and how much. Monero was built on the opposite assumption, that a payment is nobody's business but the people making it.
Private by default
There is no "privacy mode" to switch on. Every transaction hides the sender, the recipient and the amount, so no one stands out for choosing privacy.
Hidden in a crowd
Each payment is mixed with decoys drawn from the chain. An observer sees a group of possible spenders and cannot tell which one is real.
Fungible
Because coins carry no visible history, one XMR is interchangeable with any other, the way one banknote spends the same as the next.
Mined on ordinary CPUs
The RandomX algorithm is tuned for everyday processors rather than specialist machines, so anyone with a computer can take part in securing the network.
No cap, small tail
There is no fixed maximum supply. Since 2022 each block pays a flat 0.6 XMR, a small permanent reward meant to keep miners securing the chain.
No owner
There was no premine, no company and no foundation. Work is paid for by donations and steered by open discussion among contributors.
Privacy is not invisibility. Monero protects what is written on the blockchain. It does not hide what you tell an exchange, a shop or a tax office, and it does not change the laws that apply to you.
Origins
A whitepaper with no author, a launch with no founder.
Monero's story begins with a document, not a company. A paper called CryptoNote, signed with the name Nicolas van Saberhagen, described a form of electronic cash in which payments could not be linked to each other or traced back to the people making them. Its first version is dated December 2012 and a revised version followed in October 2013. The author argued that Bitcoin's open ledger was a serious flaw for something meant to work like cash. Nobody has ever established who van Saberhagen is.
The first coin built on CryptoNote was Bytecoin. It attracted attention in early 2014, and then suspicion, when people looking at its history concluded that around four fifths of the supply had already been created before the public arrived. The technology was interesting. The distribution was not something many people wanted to build on.
On 18 April 2014 a Bitcointalk forum user called "thankful_for_today" launched a fresh CryptoNote chain named BitMonero, with no premine. Within days the launcher and the early community fell out over the direction of the project. The community did something only open-source software allows: it forked the code, carried on without its founder and shortened the name to Monero, the word for "coin" in Esperanto. The plural, moneroj, follows Esperanto grammar too. thankful_for_today drifted away and, like van Saberhagen, has never been identified.
A volunteer core team of seven formed to look after the code. Five used pseudonyms: smooth, tacotime, othe, eizh and NoodleDoodle. Two used their real names: Riccardo Spagni, a South African developer better known as "fluffypony", and David Latapie. Spagni became the project's best-known voice and served as lead maintainer until he handed the role over in December 2019.
The early years were spent rewriting inherited code, surviving a spam attack in 2014 and setting up the Monero Research Lab, a loose group of cryptographers and researchers who study weaknesses and propose improvements. That research habit shaped everything after: amounts were hidden in 2017, proofs became smaller and cheaper in 2018 and 2022, and the minimum crowd each payment hides in grew from optional, to 5, to 7, to 11, to today's 16.
What makes the origin unusual is what is missing. There was no fundraising round, no allocation for insiders and no organisation that owns the name. Monero has had to earn its keep through donated time and donated money ever since, which is both its proudest feature and a recurring source of strain.
Timeline
2012 to 2026, one step at a time.
Filter by era to follow Monero from an anonymous paper to a full-chain privacy upgrade in testing.
The CryptoNote paper
The first version of the CryptoNote whitepaper is dated December 2012 and signed by the pseudonymous Nicolas van Saberhagen. It describes untraceable payments built on ring signatures and one-time keys.
CryptoNote version 2
A revised whitepaper is published. It calls privacy one of the most important features of electronic cash and treats Bitcoin's traceability as a flaw to fix.
Bytecoin and its premine
Bytecoin, the first CryptoNote coin, gains attention. Scrutiny of its history suggests about 80% of the supply was mined before the public arrived, and interest turns to a clean restart.
BitMonero launches
Bitcointalk user thankful_for_today starts a new CryptoNote chain with no premine.
The community takes over
Days after launch, users reject the launcher's plans, fork the project, rename it Monero and form a seven-person core team.
First attack, first research
The network recovers from a spam attack, and the newly formed Monero Research Lab publishes its first papers.
Decoys become compulsory
A network upgrade requires every transaction to use a ring of at least 3. Block time moves to two minutes.
Darknet attention
The AlphaBay marketplace begins accepting Monero, bringing a surge of demand and a reputation the project still carries.
RingCT hides amounts
Ring Confidential Transactions activate. By September 2017 they are mandatory and the minimum ring size rises to 5.
Pushing back on ASICs
The mining algorithm is altered to disable specialist mining hardware. Ring size rises to 7, and subaddresses and multisignature wallets arrive.
Hardware wallets
Ledger support is released, giving users a way to keep spend keys on a dedicated device.
Bulletproofs
A new range proof shrinks transactions and cuts fees sharply. Ring size is fixed at 11 for everyone.
Community Crowdfunding System
The CCS replaces the Forum Funding System as the way contributors request donations for defined pieces of work.
RandomX
Monero switches to a proof-of-work algorithm designed for general-purpose CPUs.
A change of maintainer
Riccardo "fluffypony" Spagni steps down as lead maintainer. Snipa takes over and release duties are spread across several contributors.
Dandelion++, CLSAG and a bounty
Dandelion++ (April) hides where transactions enter the network. CLSAG (October) makes ring signatures smaller and faster. In September the US tax agency offers up to $625,000 for tools to trace Monero.
Atomic swaps and P2Pool
Trustless swaps between Bitcoin and Monero become usable in August. P2Pool, a pool with no operator, launches in October.
Tail emission begins
The block reward reaches its permanent floor of 0.6 XMR.
The most recent hard fork
Ring size rises to 16. Bulletproofs+ and view tags make transactions lighter and wallets faster.
Dubai rules and a drained wallet
Dubai restricts anonymity-enhanced coins in February. In September the community crowdfunding wallet is emptied of 2,675.73 XMR; the loss is disclosed in November and covered from the General Fund.
The delisting year
OKX (January) and Binance (20 February) remove XMR. The peer-to-peer site LocalMonero closes and Haveno-based markets appear in May. Kraken ends support in the European Economic Area on 31 October.
FCMP++ takes shape
A public optimisation competition for the full-chain membership proof code runs through the summer while test networks begin.
The Qubic episode
An outside project directs large amounts of hashrate at Monero and claims majority control. An 18-block reorganisation on 14 September undoes about 118 transactions.
Records and restrictions
XMR sets an all-time price high on 14 January. In the same month the DFSA bars privacy tokens on firms it regulates in the Dubai International Financial Centre.
Clearing the path
Version 0.18.5.0 is released, and developers announce that custom transaction unlock times will be removed in the FCMP++ fork.
Stressnet version 3
The third FCMP++ and Carrot beta test network forks on 5 October. Maintenance release 0.18.5.3 follows on 6 October. Mainnet activation has no date yet.
How it works
Three questions, three answers.
Any payment raises three questions: who sent it, who received it, and how much was it? Monero answers each with a different piece of cryptography, and applies all three to every transaction.
Ring signatures
When you spend, your wallet picks 15 other past outputs from the blockchain as decoys and signs on behalf of the whole group of 16. The network can verify that one member of the ring authorised the payment, and that the money has not been spent before, without learning which member it was.
Stealth addresses
Your public address never appears on the chain. The sender uses it to derive a brand-new one-time address for each payment. Only you can recognise and spend what arrives there, and two payments to the same person look unrelated.
RingCT
Ring Confidential Transactions replace visible amounts with cryptographic commitments. Compact range proofs, called Bulletproofs+, let the network confirm that inputs equal outputs and that no coins were created from nothing, while the numbers stay hidden.
Demo: find the real signer
Sixteen identical outputs sit in this ring. One of them is really being spent; the other fifteen are decoys. Pick the one you think is real.
Choose any circle to make your guess.
A simplified picture. Real analysts also study timing and behaviour, which is why wallets choose decoys carefully, and why the FCMP++ upgrade aims to replace 16 candidates with every output on the chain.
15 decoys
Demo: one address in, many addresses out
A cafe publishes one Monero address on its website. Send it a few payments and watch what the blockchain actually records.
The strings are random stand-ins, not real cryptography. The behaviour is the point: the public address never shows up, and no two outputs match.
- No payments yet.
Two keys instead of one
A Monero wallet has a spend key and a view key. The spend key moves money and must stay secret. The view key only reveals incoming payments. You can hand a view key to an accountant, an auditor or a charity's donors so they can check what you received, without giving them the power to spend. Privacy is the default, and disclosure is a choice the owner makes.
Subaddresses
One wallet can generate an unlimited number of subaddresses, which start with an 8 rather than a 4. Give a different one to each customer or service and nobody can tell that they lead to the same wallet. It is a simple habit that stops two parties comparing notes about you.
Smaller, faster, quieter
Bulletproofs arrived in 2018 and cut the size of the proofs that keep amounts honest, which cut fees with them. Bulletproofs+ in 2022 trimmed them again. View tags, added in the same upgrade, attach a one-byte hint to each output so a wallet can skip most of the chain while scanning, making sync noticeably faster.
Hiding on the network too
Dandelion++ changes how a new transaction spreads. It first passes quietly along a chain of nodes (the stem), then bursts out to everyone (the fluff), which makes it harder for a watcher to link a transaction to the internet address it came from. Wallets can also connect over Tor or I2P.
Why "fungible" matters. On a transparent chain, a coin once linked to a hack can be refused by an exchange years later, even if the current holder did nothing wrong. Hiding history on every coin is how Monero tries to make each unit equally acceptable. Critics point out that the same property makes stolen funds harder to follow. Both things are true, and the section on risks and criticisms takes that seriously.
Mining
Secured by ordinary computers.
Monero uses proof of work, like Bitcoin: miners compete to add a block roughly every two minutes and are paid in new XMR plus fees. The difference is the hardware. Bitcoin mining is dominated by purpose-built chips called ASICs. Monero's community decided early that it wanted mining to stay within reach of normal people, and changed its algorithm several times in 2018 and 2019 to shake off specialist machines.
The lasting answer was RandomX, switched on in November 2019. It makes miners run randomly generated programs that lean on the things general-purpose processors are good at, with a large block of memory. A purpose-built chip would have to look a lot like a CPU, which removes most of the advantage. In practice Monero is mined on desktop, laptop and server processors, and graphics cards offer little benefit.
Most miners join pools to smooth out their income, and that concentrates power in whoever runs the biggest pools. P2Pool, released in October 2021, is the community's alternative: a peer-to-peer pool with no operator, no registration and payouts sent straight from the block reward. The official wallet has P2Pool mining built in.
The Qubic episode
In mid 2025 a separate project called Qubic began paying its own participants to point their processors at Monero. In August 2025 it announced it had reached 51% of the hashrate and reorganised six blocks. On 14 September 2025 the chain saw its deepest reorganisation to date: 18 blocks replaced, with roughly 118 confirmed transactions undone. Kraken paused XMR deposits for a time and other services asked for more confirmations.
Later academic analysis found the headline overstated. Researchers measured Qubic's average share at roughly a quarter to a third of the hashrate, with brief spikes near half but no sustained majority, and concluded that the "selfish mining" strategy earned it less than honest mining would have.
The episode still exposed a real weakness: a CPU-mined network can be rented or redirected by anyone with a big enough incentive. Researchers responded with proposals such as "Publish or Perish", which penalises blocks that are held back, alongside more contested ideas like checkpoints or a finality layer. As of October 2026 these remain proposals under discussion, not rules of the network.
About 2 minutes
Difficulty adjusts every block to hold the average steady.
RandomX
CPU-oriented proof of work. A revised version, RandomX v2, is being tested.
0.6 XMR
Fixed since June 2022, plus the fees in each block.
10 blocks
Received funds wait about 20 minutes before they can be spent again.
Tokenomics
No hard cap. A very long tail.
Monero's supply was released in two phases. During the main emission, from 2014 to mid 2022, the block reward shrank smoothly with every block rather than halving in steps. About 18.13 million XMR were issued this way, all of it to miners. There was no premine, no founder allocation and no sale.
In June 2022 the reward reached a floor of 0.6 XMR per block and stopped falling. This is the tail emission, and it continues indefinitely. It adds about 432 XMR a day, or roughly 158,000 a year. Because that number is constant while the total grows, the inflation rate is under 1% a year and keeps drifting lower.
The reasoning is about security rather than scarcity. A chain whose block reward falls to zero has to pay its miners from fees alone, and nobody knows yet whether that works. Monero chose a small, predictable subsidy forever so there is always something to mine for. People who want an absolute cap see this as a drawback; people who worry about long-term security see it as prudence.
Block size is not fixed either. Blocks can grow when demand rises, but a miner who makes a block much larger than the recent median gives up part of the reward. That penalty lets capacity stretch during busy periods while making it expensive to bloat the chain on purpose. The smallest unit of XMR is a piconero, one trillionth of a coin.
Total XMR in existence
A simplified model of the emission formula, in millions of XMR. Real figures differ slightly.
People and governance
An ownerless project still needs people.
There is no chief executive, no foundation and no treasury filled by a token sale. Monero runs on a handful of structures and many volunteers, a lot of whom are known only by a handle.
Core Team
A small, invitation-only group that holds the things that cannot be decentralised: domains, the website, code repositories and the General Fund. It mediates rather than commands.
Monero Research Lab
An open group of cryptographers and researchers who meet in public chat rooms, publish papers, review proposals and stress-test the protocol's privacy.
Community Crowdfunding
Contributors post a proposal with milestones; the community discusses it and donates XMR; payouts follow completed work. The CCS replaced the older Forum Funding System in 2019.
Everyone else
Volunteer groups handle wallets, translation, documentation, outreach, policy conversations with regulators, and help for victims of mining malware. Independent non-profits such as MAGIC Grants also fund work.
How decisions get made. Changes are proposed in public, argued over in open meetings and code review, and adopted only when node operators, miners and wallets choose to run the new software. Nobody can force an upgrade, which makes Monero slow to change and hard to capture.
Names worth knowing
A selection, not a ranking. Hundreds of people have contributed code. Handles are shown as their owners use them.
Nicolas van Saberhagen
Author of CryptoNoteThe name on the whitepaper Monero descends from. Widely assumed to be a pseudonym; never identified.
thankful_for_today
Launched BitMoneroStarted the chain in April 2014, clashed with its first users and left within weeks.
Riccardo "fluffypony" Spagni
Original core teamSouth African developer and Monero's best-known public voice. Lead maintainer until December 2019.
David Latapie
Original core teamOne of only two founding core team members to use a real name.
smooth, tacotime, othe, eizh, NoodleDoodle
Original core teamThe five pseudonymous founding members who took the code over from its launcher.
Snipa
Lead maintainer from 2019Took over repository maintenance when Spagni stepped back.
luigi1111 and binaryFate
Core team stewardsNamed in 2019 as responsible for release signing, infrastructure, and the General Fund and crowdfunding wallets.
selsta
Release engineeringPrepares and ships the regular wallet and node releases.
Shen Noether
Monero Research LabPseudonymous researcher who designed RingCT, the system that hides amounts.
tevador
Protocol designerLead designer of RandomX and the Jamtis address scheme; author of the 2025 "Publish or Perish" mining proposal.
koe
Protocol designerCreator of Seraphis, the next-generation transaction protocol under long-term research.
Luke "kayabaNerve" Parker
FCMP++ designerDesigned the full-chain membership proofs now in testing.
Justin Berman (j-berman)
FCMP++ integrationBuilds FCMP++ into the Monero software and publishes the stressnet releases.
jeffro256
Carrot authorWrote the Carrot addressing specification and its implementations, and coordinated its audits.
SChernykh (sech1)
MiningCreated P2Pool and maintains it; a contributor to RandomX and to monitoring during the Qubic episode.
ArticMine
Scaling and feesLongtime contributor behind Monero's dynamic block size and fee design.
Howard Chu (hyc)
Database and miningAuthor of the LMDB database Monero uses to store its chain, and a RandomX contributor.
Rucknium
ResearchStatistician whose work focuses on how decoys are selected and how the network behaves in practice.
Justin Ehrenhofer
Community and fundingLong-time organiser involved in the crowdfunding system and the MAGIC Grants non-profit.
plowsof
Community workgroupModerates community meetings and helps shepherd crowdfunding proposals.
Upgrades and roadmap
From a ring of 16 to the whole chain.
Monero upgrades through scheduled hard forks: everyone moves to new rules at an agreed block. The most recent one activated in August 2022 and brought rings of 16, Bulletproofs+ and view tags. Since then the "Fluorine Fermi" software line has received steady maintenance releases, most recently version 0.18.5.3 on 6 October 2026, without changing the consensus rules.
The next fork is the largest change in years. FCMP++ (full-chain membership proofs) replaces ring signatures altogether. Instead of proving "my coin is one of these 16", a transaction proves "my coin is one of all the outputs that exist", more than 150 million of them, without revealing which. The guessing game in the demo above stops being 1 in 16 and becomes 1 in everything.
It travels with Carrot, a new way of deriving addresses and keys that keeps existing addresses working while tightening several privacy and security properties and adding new wallet key tiers. Parts of both have been externally audited, the proof code went through a public optimisation contest in 2025, and the combined system has been running on dedicated test networks called stressnets, with further audits of the integration planned.
Where it stands, October 2026: FCMP++ and Carrot are not live on the main network. The third beta stressnet release was published on 25 September 2026 and forked its test network on 5 October 2026. No mainnet date has been set. A non-binding planning draft kept by one of the developers pencils in early 2027, and timelines for work like this often slip. Treat any firm date you read elsewhere with caution.
FCMP++
Full-chain membership proofs. The anonymity set becomes every output on the chain instead of a ring of 16.
Carrot
A backward-compatible addressing scheme designed alongside FCMP++, with stronger guarantees for how outputs are recognised and spent.
RandomX v2
A revision of the mining algorithm, included in the latest stressnet for evaluation.
Unlock-time removal
Custom transaction unlock times, a rarely used feature that made transactions stand out, are already refused by nodes and will be removed in the FCMP++ fork.
Cuprate
A second, independent node implementation written in Rust, so the network does not depend on a single codebase.
Seraphis and Jamtis
A longer-term redesign of the transaction protocol and address format. FCMP++ and Carrot deliver much of its benefit sooner; the rest stays on the research list with ideas such as Bulletproofs++ and better decoy selection.
Regulation and delistings
Legal to hold in most places. Harder to buy in many.
Rules about privacy coins almost always target regulated businesses, not individuals. The practical effect is that the number of mainstream exchanges offering XMR has been shrinking since 2018.
AMLR, from July 2027
The EU's Anti-Money Laundering Regulation applies from 10 July 2027. It bars banks and crypto-asset service providers from offering anonymous accounts or handling anonymity-enhancing coins. It regulates providers; it does not make holding XMR in your own wallet an offence. Many platforms have already acted in advance.
Off licensed exchanges
Japan's regulator pushed registered exchanges to drop privacy coins in 2018. South Korea followed with anti-money-laundering rules that took privacy coins off domestic exchanges around 2020 to 2021.
Two regulators, same answer
Dubai's virtual-asset regulator prohibited licensed activity involving anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies in February 2023. In January 2026 the DFSA, which oversees the Dubai International Financial Centre, barred privacy tokens on the firms it regulates.
Global removals in 2024
OKX removed its XMR pairs in January 2024. Binance, then the largest venue for XMR trading, delisted it on 20 February 2024, citing compliance.
Region by region
Kraken stopped offering XMR in the United Kingdom in 2021, in Ireland and Belgium in 2024, and across the European Economic Area on 31 October 2024. It continues to list XMR for customers elsewhere.
A patchwork
In countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom there is no outright ban, but some exchanges have removed privacy coins to simplify compliance. Rules change often, so check the current position where you live.
What the delistings did, and did not, do
Each removal cut liquidity and made XMR harder to reach for people who only use large apps. It did not stop the network, which needs no exchange to function. Trading moved toward the smaller exchanges that remain, peer-to-peer markets and swap services, and Monero's market price went on to set a new all-time high in January 2026. Regulators argue that privacy coins frustrate the customer checks the financial system relies on. Supporters reply that financial privacy is normal, that cash has always offered it, and that view keys let a user prove their own history when asked. That argument is not settled.
Comparison
Monero vs Zcash vs Bitcoin.
Three proof-of-work coins with three different ideas about what the public should be able to see.
| Feature | Monero (XMR) | Zcash (ZEC) | Bitcoin (BTC) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launched | April 2014 | October 2016 | January 2009 |
| Privacy model | Mandatory for every transaction | Optional: shielded and transparent addresses coexist | None built in; the ledger is public and pseudonymous |
| Core technique | Ring signatures, stealth addresses, RingCT | Zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) | Plain digital signatures |
| Crowd you hide in | A ring of 16 today; every output on the chain once FCMP++ activates | Everyone using the same shielded pool | Not applicable |
| Supply | No cap; 0.6 XMR per block forever | Capped at 21 million | Capped at 21 million |
| Mining | RandomX, aimed at ordinary CPUs | Equihash, mined with specialist hardware | SHA-256, mined with specialist hardware |
| Block time | About 2 minutes | About 75 seconds | About 10 minutes |
| Launch and funding | No premine; donations and crowdfunding | Launched by a company; a share of block rewards has funded development | No premine; grants, companies and volunteers |
| Selective disclosure | View keys and payment proofs | Viewing keys | Everything is already public |
| Exchange access | Removed from many large exchanges | More widely listed, with restrictions in some regions | Listed almost everywhere |
Want the other side of this table in detail? See our Zcash guide.
Wallets guide
Where your keys live.
A Monero wallet stores your keys and scans the chain for your payments. All of the wallets below are listed on the Monero project's own downloads page as of October 2026. Filter by the device you use.
Monero GUI Wallet
Windows, macOS, Linux
The project's own graphical wallet. Simple and advanced modes, built-in node and P2Pool mining, Ledger and Trezor support.
Monero CLI Wallet
Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD
The command-line reference wallet and node. The most complete feature set, aimed at developers and confident users.
Feather Wallet
Windows, macOS, Linux
A fast, lightweight open-source desktop wallet with coin control, Tor support and hardware wallet integration.
Cake Wallet
Android, iPhone, desktop
A popular open-source multi-coin wallet that began as a Monero wallet. Includes built-in swaps and Ledger support.
Monerujo
Android
A long-running open-source Android wallet for Monero, with Ledger support and multiple wallets in one app.
Stack Wallet
Android, iPhone, desktop
An open-source multi-coin wallet with a privacy focus and support for connecting to your own node.
Unstoppable Wallet
Android, iPhone
An open-source multi-coin mobile wallet that includes Monero alongside many other assets.
Edge
Android, iPhone
A multi-coin mobile wallet. It syncs Monero through a remote server for speed, which means sharing your view key with that server.
ANONERO and Monfluo
Android
Two Monero-only Android wallets on the official list, aimed at experienced users who want fine-grained control.
Ledger
Nano S, Nano S Plus, Nano X
Keeps the spend key on the device. Works with the official wallets, Feather, Cake Wallet and Monerujo.
Trezor
Model T, Safe 3, Safe 5
Keeps the spend key on the device. Works with the official GUI and CLI wallets and with Feather.
Where to get XMR
The routes that still exist.
Availability depends heavily on where you live, and it changes. This is a neutral map of the options, not a recommendation. Use only services that are lawful for you.
- Set up a wallet firstInstall a wallet from the guide above, back up the seed phrase and copy your receiving address. You need somewhere to send coins before you acquire any.
- Check what is permitted where you liveSome countries restrict exchanges from offering privacy coins. Tax and reporting rules apply to XMR as they do to other crypto assets.
- Pick a route that fitsChoose between a regulated exchange, a peer-to-peer market, a swap from another coin, or earning XMR directly. Each is described below.
- Start with a small testSend a small amount first and confirm it arrives. Monero addresses are long; always paste, never retype.
- Withdraw to your own walletCoins left on a platform are a promise from that platform. Coins in your wallet are yours, and so is the responsibility for the backup.
Centralised exchanges
Accounts with identity checks, bank deposits and an order book. The Monero project's exchange list currently names Kraken (not available to customers in the EEA or UK), Bitfinex and a few regional or over-the-counter desks. Other exchanges list XMR too, and listings change; confirm on the exchange's own site.
Peer-to-peer markets
Haveno is open-source software for trading XMR directly with other people, with funds held in multi-signature escrow rather than by a company. The Haveno developers do not run or endorse a network themselves; third parties operate their own, of which RetoSwap is the best known. Bisq offers a similar model centred on Bitcoin. You deal with a stranger, so read the dispute rules first.
Atomic swaps
An atomic swap exchanges Bitcoin for Monero directly between two people: either both sides complete or both are refunded, with no custodian in the middle. Eigenwallet and BasicSwap are the tools named on the Monero project's site.
Instant swap services
Websites and in-wallet features that convert one coin into another without an order book. They are quick, but they are companies: they set the rate, hold your funds briefly and may ask for identity documents if a transaction is flagged. The Monero project's merchant and exchange page lists several.
Earn it
Accept XMR for goods, services or freelance work, and it arrives without any exchange at all. Merchants ranging from VPN providers to small online shops take it directly.
Mine it
Because RandomX runs on ordinary processors, anyone can mine from the official wallet or through P2Pool. Expect small amounts and count the electricity; treat it as participation rather than income.
Risks and criticisms
The honest ledger.
Monero attracts strong opinions in both directions. These are the criticisms worth understanding before you form your own.
Illicit use
This is the central objection, and it is grounded in fact. Monero has been adopted by darknet markets, demanded by ransomware groups and mined by malware on hijacked machines. One analysis found that nearly half of the darknet markets launched in 2025 accepted only Monero. Supporters answer that most crime still runs on cash and transparent assets, and that privacy tools are used far more by ordinary people than by criminals. That is a fair point about proportion, but it does not make the harm disappear. A tool that protects a dissident's donations protects an extortionist's too, and anyone weighing Monero should hold both facts at once.
Privacy has limits
"Untraceable" is a marketing word, not a guarantee. Academic studies in 2017 and 2018 showed that many early transactions could be traced because of weak decoy rules, which were later fixed. A presentation by an analytics firm that leaked in 2024 described using its own network nodes to gather internet addresses and timing data. Investigators have followed funds in at least one criminal case, apparently helped by the points where coins entered and left regulated exchanges. Privacy depends on how the software is used as well as on the mathematics.
Mining concentration
The Qubic episode of 2025 showed that a determined outsider can gather enough CPU power to disrupt the chain, reorganise recent blocks and force exchanges to pause deposits. No funds were shown to be stolen, but confidence was dented, and the long-term defences are still being debated.
Regulatory squeeze
Each delisting makes XMR harder to buy and sell through mainstream channels. The EU rules arriving in 2027 will narrow access further for European residents. A coin can be perfectly legal to hold and still be awkward to use.
Thinner liquidity
Fewer venues and fewer market makers mean wider spreads and sharper price moves. In January 2026 a public investigator suggested that a rapid price spike was partly driven by a thief converting stolen coins into XMR through swap services, a reminder that this market can be moved by single actors.
Volunteer fragility
In September 2023 the wallet holding community crowdfunding donations was drained of 2,675.73 XMR. The cause was never publicly established. The Core Team covered the loss from the General Fund, but it showed how much trust rests on a few individuals' operational security.
Hidden amounts, hidden bugs
Because amounts are encrypted, nobody can simply add up the coins. The supply is checked by cryptographic proofs instead. If those proofs had a flaw, counterfeit coins could in theory go unnoticed for a while. Past bugs of this kind were found and patched before being exploited, as far as anyone knows.
Cost and convenience
Private transactions are larger than Bitcoin's, wallets take longer to sync, hardware-wallet support is narrower, and big upgrades arrive slowly because unpaid reviewers must be convinced. None of this is fatal, but it is friction.
Glossary
The vocabulary, decoded.
- Atomic swap
- A direct exchange between two different blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Monero, that either completes for both sides or refunds both, with no intermediary holding funds.
- Bulletproofs+
- The compact proof Monero uses to show that a hidden amount is a valid, non-negative number. It replaced the original Bulletproofs in 2022.
- Carrot
- A new addressing and key-derivation scheme being tested alongside FCMP++. It keeps existing addresses working.
- CCS
- Community Crowdfunding System: the public process through which contributors propose work and receive donated XMR on completion.
- CLSAG
- The ring signature format in use since 2020. Smaller and faster than the one it replaced.
- CryptoNote
- The 2012 to 2013 protocol design that Monero grew out of, written under the name Nicolas van Saberhagen.
- Dandelion++
- A way of relaying new transactions that hides which internet address they first came from.
- Decoy
- A past output included in a ring to make the real one harder to pick out. Also called a mixin.
- FCMP++
- Full-chain membership proofs. A planned replacement for ring signatures that hides the real output among all outputs on the chain.
- Fungibility
- The property that every unit is interchangeable with every other, because none carries a visible history.
- Hard fork
- A scheduled change of network rules that every node must adopt. Monero uses hard forks for major upgrades.
- Key image
- A unique marker published when an output is spent. It lets the network block double-spends without revealing which output was used.
- Node
- A computer running the Monero software that stores the blockchain and checks every transaction against the rules.
- Output
- A single received amount on the chain. Wallets spend outputs, not account balances.
- P2Pool
- A decentralised mining pool with no operator, where miners are paid directly in the block they help find.
- Piconero
- The smallest unit of Monero: 0.000000000001 XMR.
- RandomX
- Monero's proof-of-work algorithm since 2019, designed to run best on ordinary CPUs.
- Remote node
- Someone else's node that your wallet connects to instead of running its own. Convenient, but less private.
- Reorganisation
- When nodes switch to a longer competing chain and recent blocks are replaced. Deep ones can undo confirmed transactions.
- Ring signature
- A signature made on behalf of a group so that a verifier knows one member signed but cannot tell which.
- RingCT
- Ring Confidential Transactions: the system that has hidden Monero amounts since 2017.
- Seed phrase
- A list of words that encodes your wallet's keys. Whoever holds it controls the funds.
- Selfish mining
- A strategy where a miner withholds blocks it has found and releases them later to waste competitors' work.
- Spend key
- The private key that authorises spending. It should never leave your wallet or hardware device.
- Stealth address
- A one-time address generated by the sender for each payment, so the recipient's public address never appears on the chain.
- Subaddress
- An extra receiving address generated from the same wallet. Different subaddresses cannot be linked by outsiders.
- Tail emission
- The permanent 0.6 XMR block reward that began in June 2022.
- View key
- A private key that reveals a wallet's incoming payments without allowing them to be spent. Useful for audits.
- View tag
- A one-byte hint attached to each output that lets wallets skip most outputs that are not theirs, speeding up sync.
- XMR
- The ticker symbol for Monero.
Quiz
Ten questions. No one is watching.
Check what stuck. Each answer comes with a short explanation.
FAQ
Questions people actually ask.
What is Monero in simple terms?
Monero is a cryptocurrency designed to work like digital cash. It runs on its own blockchain, has no company behind it, and hides the sender, the recipient and the amount of every transaction by default. Its ticker symbol is XMR.
Who created Monero?
Nobody knows for certain. The underlying design, CryptoNote, was published under the pseudonym Nicolas van Saberhagen. The chain itself was launched on 18 April 2014 by an anonymous forum user called thankful_for_today, and was taken over days later by a volunteer community that renamed it Monero. Riccardo "fluffypony" Spagni became its best-known early maintainer.
Is Monero legal?
In most countries it is legal for an individual to own and use Monero. What varies is whether regulated exchanges are allowed to offer it. Japan, South Korea and Dubai restrict exchanges from listing privacy coins, and European Union rules that apply from 10 July 2027 will stop crypto service providers there from handling them. Laws differ and change, so check the rules where you live.
Is Monero really untraceable?
No system can promise that. Monero's design hides addresses and amounts on the blockchain far more thoroughly than transparent coins do, and there is no public tool that reliably traces it. But researchers have found weaknesses in the past, analytics firms claim some success using network and timing data, and information you give to exchanges or merchants is outside the protocol's protection.
How many Monero coins will there be?
There is no maximum. About 18.13 million XMR were issued by mid 2022. Since then each block adds 0.6 XMR, roughly 158,000 XMR a year, indefinitely. That works out at under 1% inflation a year, and the rate keeps falling as the total grows.
How is Monero different from Bitcoin?
Bitcoin's ledger is public: anyone can see every address, balance and transfer. Monero hides all three. Monero also has no supply cap, uses two-minute blocks, and is mined with ordinary computer processors rather than specialist machines.
Can I still buy Monero on an exchange?
Yes, but on fewer than before. Binance and OKX removed XMR in 2024 and Kraken no longer offers it in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, though it does elsewhere. Other routes include peer-to-peer markets built on Haveno, atomic swaps from Bitcoin and instant swap services. Availability depends on your country.
What is FCMP++ and has it launched?
FCMP++ stands for full-chain membership proofs. It is an upgrade that replaces the ring of 16 possible senders with a proof covering every output on the blockchain. As of October 2026 it is running on test networks only. No date has been set for activation on the main network.
Can I mine Monero at home?
Yes. The RandomX algorithm is built for ordinary CPUs, and the official wallet can mine solo or through P2Pool with a few clicks. Earnings from a single home computer are small and may not cover the electricity, so most people who do it treat it as a way to support the network.
What is a view key?
A view key is one of the two private keys in a Monero wallet. It lets whoever holds it see the wallet's incoming payments but not spend them. People share view keys with accountants, auditors or the public when they want to prove what they received.
Sources
Where this comes from.
Facts on this page were checked against the references below in October 2026. Primary sources from the Monero project are listed first.
- Monero Project: downloads and wallet list
- Monero Project: roadmap
- Monero Project: merchants and exchanges
- Monero Project: team and workgroups
- Monero Project: Moneropedia entry on tail emission
- Monero Project: Moneropedia entry on RandomX
- Monero Core Team: update on technical responsibilities (December 2019)
- Monero Core Team: Community Crowdfunding System wallet incident (November 2023)
- Monero Project: deprecating custom transaction unlock time (May 2026)
- Monero Project: GUI 0.18.5.3 release notes (October 2026)
- GitHub: FCMP++ and Carrot beta stressnet v3.0 release
- GitHub: jeffro256, FCMP++/Carrot work breakdown (non-binding draft plan)
- Monero CCS: jeffro256 full-time development proposal, 2026 Q1
- Monero Research Lab: "Publish or Perish" selfish-mining mitigations (issue 144)
- Lee and Kim: "Inside Qubic's Selfish Mining Campaign on Monero" (arXiv 2512.01437)
- Qubic: its own account of the August 2025 hashrate demonstration
- CCN: the September 2025 Monero reorganisation explained
- Coinspeaker: developers discuss the "Publish or Perish" proposal
- Cointelegraph: Kraken ends Monero support in the European Economic Area
- Cointelegraph: EU rules on anonymous accounts and privacy tokens from 2027
- The Defiant: Dubai bans privacy tokens on regulated exchanges
- CCN: countries restricting privacy coins in 2026
- Decrypt: response to the leaked Chainalysis Monero tracing video
- The Block: Monero's January 2026 all-time high
- CryptoTicker: FCMP++ stressnet fork on 5 October 2026
- The Monero Moon newsletter, issue 83
- Wikipedia: Monero (general history and references)
- CoinGecko: live market data API