What is Monero (XMR)? A plain-English guide

Monero (XMR) is a cryptocurrency built for private payments. Every transaction hides the sender, the receiver and the amount by default, so its public record can’t be read like a bank statement.^[1] It runs on a decentralised network rather than through a bank or payment company, and it has been live since 18 April 2014.^[2]

XMR is Monero’s ticker, the short code that exchanges and wallets use. This guide covers the basics and links to a deeper guide on each topic.

Where did Monero come from?

Monero wasn’t built from Bitcoin’s code. It’s based on an earlier protocol called CryptoNote.^[1] It launched as “Bitmonero”. After the community decided to fork away from the original maintainer, the “Bit” was dropped, leaving Monero, the Esperanto word for “coin”.^[1]

There was no premine (coins created for insiders before launch), no token sale and no presale of any kind.^[2]

How does Monero keep payments private?

Monero combines three techniques, and every transaction uses all of them:^[1]

• Ring signatures hide the sender. Your wallet signs each payment alongside 15 decoys, so an observer sees 16 possible sources for the money and can’t tell for certain which one is real.^[2]
• Stealth addresses hide the receiver. You can publish one address, but each payment goes to a fresh one-time address that can’t be linked back to it.^[4]
• RingCT (Ring Confidential Transactions) hides the amount. The network can still check that no coins were created out of thin air, without seeing the numbers.^[1]

Privacy is mandatory, so there’s no way to send a transparent payment by accident. Bitcoin works the other way: anyone can see how much was sent from one user to another.^[1] Monero vs Bitcoin compares the two in detail, while Privacy coins explained and Monero vs Zcash cover other designs.

Strong privacy isn’t the same as complete anonymity, and the project says so itself: “There is no such thing as 100% anonymous.”^[1] Sender privacy rests on decoys, so it is probabilistic rather than absolute. And if your wallet connects through someone else’s node, your IP address isn’t hidden by default.^[2] How private is Monero? explains what it hides and what it doesn’t.

How does a Monero payment work?

Here’s what happens, in simple terms:

1. The person being paid shares their Monero address, a long string of letters and numbers.
2. The sender’s wallet builds the transaction. It picks the decoys, works out a one-time address for the receiver, hides the amount and adds a network fee.^[4]
3. The wallet broadcasts the transaction to Monero nodes, the computers that keep copies of the blockchain. The network checks that it’s valid, including that the same coins haven’t already been spent.^[1]
4. A miner includes it in a block. A new block is added about every two minutes.^[1]
5. The receiver’s wallet scans new blocks to find the payments that belong to it.^[1] Only the sender and the receiver can tell where the payment went.^[4]

To read the blockchain, a wallet connects to a node: your own, or a remote one run by someone else. Monero nodes: local vs remote explains what each choice means for privacy.

How is Monero mined?

Mining adds new blocks and creates new coins. Miners race to solve a computing puzzle, called proof of work, and the winner adds the next block and earns the block reward plus the fees of the transactions inside it.^[1]

Since 30 November 2019, Monero’s proof of work has been RandomX, an algorithm optimised for general-purpose computer processors (CPUs).^[3] It strongly reduces the advantage of ASICs, specialised mining machines that are expensive and that few can afford. The aim is to stop a handful of operators from controlling most of the mining, so that miners with common hardware can compete fairly.^[1]

Does Monero have a maximum supply?

No. Monero has a fixed emission rate instead of a maximum supply.^[1] Its main emission, with block rewards that shrank smoothly over time, produced about 18.1 million coins by the end of May 2022.^[2] Then the tail emission began: a permanent reward of 0.6 XMR per block, or 0.3 XMR a minute, which started at block 2,641,623 on 9 June 2022.^[1]

The idea is to keep miners paid without relying only on fees, which also helps keep fees low.^[1] The project puts the resulting inflation at under 1%, falling over time as the same reward is added to a growing supply.^[2]

How do Monero fees work?

Every payment includes a network fee, paid to the miner who adds it to a block. Monero’s fees are dynamic rather than fixed, and the fee is one part of a transaction that isn’t encrypted, even though the amount is.^[1] The network fee goes to miners, not to any company. Amounts can also be very small: the smallest unit, one piconero, is a trillionth of an XMR.^[2]

What is Monero used for?

People use Monero much as they use other cryptocurrencies, except that the details stay off the public record:

• Paying people and businesses that accept it. You can get Monero from an exchange or directly from another person.^[1]
• Keeping finances private. On a transparent blockchain, anyone who knows your address can follow your payments. Monero hides the sender, receiver and amount.^[1]
• Money that’s interchangeable. Because coins carry no visible history, people receiving Monero don’t need to check whether it was once linked to a crime. This property is called fungibility.^[1]
• Mining with ordinary computers, which is another way to get it.^[1]

The same privacy can also hide crime. EU lawmakers wrote that the anonymity of crypto-assets “exposes them to risks of misuse for criminal purposes”.^[5] That tension is behind most of the rules covered below.

Is Monero safer than Bitcoin?

It depends on what “safer” means. For privacy, Monero hides by default what Bitcoin shows to everyone.^[1] But neither coin protects you from scams, a lost backup or a hacked phone, and Monero’s privacy has limits of its own. Monero vs Bitcoin sets out the trade-offs without picking a winner.

Is Monero legal in the USA?

As far as we can find, yes: as of November 2026, no US law bans owning or using Monero. Access is another matter. Monero isn’t on the exchange Kraken’s list of assets restricted for US clients, but Kraken doesn’t let clients in the European Economic Area, the UK, Canada or Australia deposit or trade it.^[6]

For the details, see Is Monero legal in the US? and our country-by-country guide.

Why is Monero getting banned?

For individuals, mostly it isn’t: the new rules target businesses. From 10 July 2027, an EU regulation bars crypto-asset service providers, such as exchanges, from keeping accounts that allow “the anonymisation or increased obfuscation of transactions, including through anonymity-enhancing coins”.^[5] Exchanges in several regions have already dropped Monero. Why exchanges delist Monero explains the anti-money-laundering rules behind this, with a dated timeline.

What are the risks and limits of Monero?

• Scams. Crypto payments typically can’t be reversed, and the US Federal Trade Commission warns that only scammers demand payment in crypto or guarantee profits.^[7]
• Getting in and out. Not every exchange lists Monero, and some don’t offer it in certain countries.^[6]
• Different laws. Rules for the businesses that handle Monero vary by country and are tightening in some places, including the EU.^[5]
• Your own mistakes. Monero can’t protect you if you give out your secret keys, share your name and address with the other party, or use a weak password.^[1]
• Self-custody. If you lose your recovery phrase and your device, no one can restore your wallet for you.

What is FCMP++, and is it live?

FCMP++ is a planned upgrade, built on full-chain membership proofs, that would replace ring signatures.^[8] Instead of hiding the source of a payment among 16 possibilities, each payment would prove that it comes from somewhere among all the outputs on the blockchain. A 2024 getmonero.org post put that at about 100 million.^[8]

As of November 2026, it isn’t live. Monero’s last network upgrade (hard fork) was in August 2022.^[1] FCMP++ runs only on a public test network called a stressnet, where developers released a new beta on 26 October 2026, with a warning that it will likely have bugs.^[9] No date had been announced for the main network. Until it arrives, the privacy described in this guide is what applies.

How do you start using Monero safely?

1. Choose a wallet with care. getmonero.org publishes the project’s desktop wallets. Mobile and light wallets come from other teams, and the project strongly recommends doing your own research on whether they’re safe.^[10] Monero wallets explained covers the main types and how backups work.
2. Verify the download. Check its hash against the project’s signed list before you install. The project warns that a corrupted file could cost you your funds.^[10]
3. Back up your recovery phrase offline. Write it down, keep it private and never type it into a website. The project’s warning about cloud backups is blunt: “you’ll be poorer soon”.^[1]
4. Decide how your wallet connects. Your own node gives the most privacy, a remote node more convenience.^[1] Light wallets go further and share your view key with a server, which can reduce your privacy if you don’t control that server.^[10] See Monero nodes: local vs remote.
5. Start small. Send a small test payment first, and check the address before every payment.

Mantis Payments is building another option. It plans free end-to-end encrypted chat with Monero payments inside conversations, using a self-custodial wallet whose keys would stay on your phone. Each payment would show the 0.5% Mantis fee separately from the Monero network fee, and the recipient would get exactly the amount promised. The app is in development and isn’t in any app store yet.