Monero

Monero is a cryptocurrency whose transactions are private by default. Where Bitcoin publishes every sender, receiver and amount for anyone to read forever, Monero hides all three in every transaction, for every user, with no setting to forget. Cole’s words for it were blunt: Monero is the only thing that is really private right now, and the government sees everything with Bitcoin. This page lays out the case behind that view, where it holds and where it doesn’t, the big upgrade in testing as of late October 2026, and how to use it. It describes what the software does; it is not financial advice.

Private by default

The Monero FAQ sums up the design: “Monero uses three different privacy technologies: ring signatures, ring confidential transactions (RingCT), and stealth addresses. These hide the sender, amount, and receiver in the transaction, respectively.” And then the part that matters most: “All transactions on the network are private by mandate; there is no way to accidentally send a transparent transaction.”

That last point is the nuance behind Cole’s take. Other systems can be private too: Bitcoin has privacy tools (PayJoin, silent payments, CoinJoin), and Zcash’s shielded transactions use strong cryptography. But on Bitcoin privacy is something you add, one careful step at a time, and Zcash itself describes its users as having “the option to keep your financial information private (shielded), or transparent.” When privacy is optional, using it can itself stand out, and the crowd you hide in is only the people who opted in. On Monero everyone is in the same crowd, all the time, which is also why the project says plainly that Monero is not a mixer: there is nothing to opt into.

How it works

Stealth addresses hide the receiver

You publish one address, but every payment to it lands at a fresh one-time address on the blockchain that no one else can connect to yours. In Moneropedia’s words, “only the sender and receiver can determine where a payment was sent.” Every wallet has a private view key (to find incoming payments), a private spend key (to spend them), and a public address built from both. Subaddresses let you hand each payer a different address that still belongs to one wallet.

Ring signatures hide the sender

Each input of a transaction is signed with a ring: the coin actually being spent plus decoys picked from the blockchain, 16 members in all since the network upgrade of August 2022. Anyone can verify that one member of the ring signed, and no one can tell which. A ring signature “makes use of your account keys and a number of public keys (also known as outputs) pulled from the blockchain,” chosen with a statistical distribution meant to look like real spending.

RingCT hides the amount

Ring Confidential Transactions, mandatory for every transaction since September 2017, hide amounts while still letting every node verify that no money was created from nothing. The range proofs that make this work were upgraded to Bulletproofs+ in the same 2022 upgrade that raised the ring size.

Dandelion++ hides where a transaction came from

Since version 0.16 (2020), nodes relay new transactions with Dandelion++, which passes a transaction along a random path before broadcasting it, so the first node that announces it is probably not the one that created it.

View keys allow selective transparency

Monero calls itself “private, optionally transparent.” Sharing a private view key lets someone see every incoming payment to an address, for an accountant or an audit, though not reliably its outgoing ones. To prove a single payment, you can share that transaction’s key instead, which reveals just that payment; Cake Wallet’s page shows how.

FCMP++: the upgrade in testing

Rings are Monero’s weakest link. Getmonero.org’s FCMP++ announcement lists the problems: rings are “vulnerable to attacks such as the EAE attack, have difficulties upon chain reorganizations, and in general enable statistical analysis.” With 16 members, a ring only hides the real coin among 16 possibilities.

FCMP++ (Full-Chain Membership Proofs, plus spend authorization and linkability) replaces rings with a proof that the coin being spent is one of all the outputs on the chain. The current test release explains it this way: instead of proving you own one of 16 outputs, “you make a proof that you own 1 of the 150 million+ Monero outputs from across the entire Monero blockchain.” It ships with Carrot, a new addressing protocol that keeps existing addresses working. The design also makes room for outgoing view keys, transaction chaining for layer-two protocols, and privacy that holds up even against an attacker with a quantum computer, with wallets adopting those features on their own schedule afterward.

Where it stands as of October 28, 2026:

• It is not live. The released Monero software is version 0.18.5.4 (October 16, 2026), and the protocol still uses rings of 16. The project’s May 2026 announcement said “a FCMP++ fork date is not set,” and no mainnet date has been announced on getmonero.org since.
• It is in public testing. The FCMP++ and Carrot beta stressnet, version 3.0, hard-forked from the test network on October 5, 2026, at block 3,102,800. Version 3.1 followed on October 26 and fixed, among other things, “a detectable inflation vulnerability” that was exposed for the first 24 hours of that test fork: exactly the kind of bug the test exists to find before real money is involved.
• One feature is going away. Custom transaction unlock times will be removed at the FCMP++ fork; new transactions created after June 1, 2026 with an unlock time past the fork will unlock as soon as the fork block arrives.

Until it ships, there is nothing for a user to do except keep wallet software current and update when getmonero.org announces the release.

What it does not protect

The Monero FAQ is refreshingly honest about this: “There is no such thing as 100% anonymous.” Its list:

• The crowd is only Monero users. “Your anonymity set is the set of people using Monero.”
• Software has bugs, and “ways may exist to infer some information through Monero’s privacy layers, either now or later. Attacks only get better.”
• Your own actions leak. “If you use Monero but give your name and address to another party, the other party will not magically forget your name and address.” The exchange that sold you Monero knows who you are, and so does the merchant who ships you a package.
• Remote nodes see your IP. A node operator “is able to see from what IP address a transaction comes from (even if cannot see the recipient nor the amount).” Run your own node, or reach a remote one over Tor or I2P.

Two more limits come from outside the protocol:

• Fewer on-ramps. Several regulated exchanges have dropped Monero; Binance, the largest, delisted it in February 2024. Buying and selling it usually means a smaller exchange or a swap service, each with its own rules.
• Privacy is not the same as security. In August 2025 the Qubic mining pool gained enough of Monero’s hashrate to reorganize recent blocks, a six-block reorganization by the security firm Halborn’s account. Transactions stayed private, but a reorganization can undo recent confirmations, which is why careful merchants and exchanges wait for more of them.

Mining

Monero uses RandomX, a proof of work designed to be ASIC-resistant: it “strongly reduces the efficiency of ASICs, making them not profitable to build,” so ordinary computers can mine. That is the opposite of Bitcoin, where a Bitaxe needs a dedicated chip. Monero also has no maximum supply: since June 2022 every block pays a constant 0.6 XMR “tail emission,” an inflation rate under 1% that falls toward zero over time, so miners always have a reason to secure the chain.

Using it

• A wallet. Cake Wallet on a phone is the wallet on Cole’s list. The official GUI wallet runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and the official command line tools also ship for Android and FreeBSD. A lightweight wallet gives its view key to a server that scans for you, which is convenient and less private.
• A node. The official monerod can run pruned: monerod --prune-blockchain removes most of the old ring signature data, syncs about a third of the chain from scratch, and has “no privacy or security downsides.” The project still prefers a full node when you can, and a pruned node over a remote one. If your node runs at home, a phone wallet can reach it from anywhere over a private network such as Tailscale instead of a stranger’s remote node. (Bitcoin’s version of this setup is Sparrow talking to your own Bitcoin Core.)
• Verify downloads. Each release post lists SHA-256 hashes, and the GPG-signed hashes file on getmonero.org “should be treated as canonical.” See PGP for checking signatures.

Gotchas

• Seeds stay offline. The FAQ again: “If you backup your seed in the cloud, you’ll be poorer soon.”
• Restore heights. Restoring a wallet from a block height after its first transaction can hide older funds.
• Swaps are a hop. A swap service sees both sides of the trade, like an exchange.
• Old guides are getting older. Anything written about unlock times or ring sizes changes again at the FCMP++ fork. Check dates.
• The wiki never shows an address. Monero addresses are long strings that start with a 4 or an 8, and this wiki’s safety check rejects them, like keys and seeds.