How Monero works
Monero is private digital cash. Every transaction hides the sender, the receiver and the amount — by default, for every user, with no opt-in, no extra steps and no "privacy mode" switch. This page explains each piece in plain English, with current parameters as of September 2026.
The three privacies
Every Monero transaction hides three things at once. Three technologies do the work — all mandatory since 2017.
Stealth addresses — who receives
Every payment generates a fresh one-time address on the fly. On-chain there are no reusable addresses at all — only one-time keys. Only the recipient's wallet can recognize and spend its payments; nobody can link two payments to the same receiver.
Ring signatures — who sends
A spend references a group of 16 possible sources: the real one plus 15 decoys drawn from the entire chain history (ring size 16, mandatory since August 2022). A verifier proves the spender owns one of them — an observer can't tell which. The upgrade in development, FCMP++, will replace rings with proofs over every output ever created.
RingCT — how much
Since January 2017, amounts are hidden with Pedersen commitments. Bulletproofs+ range proofs (audited, shipped 2022) let the network verify no negative or inflated amounts exist — without learning the values.
Under the hood
View keys — privacy ≠ opacity
You can share a private view key with an auditor, exchange or partner to prove your incoming funds without revealing spending. Selective disclosure is built in: privacy from the world, transparency for whoever you choose.
Blocks & lock time
A block every ~2 minutes. A merchant sees your payment in the next block and can ship with zero chargeback risk; you can spend received funds onward after 10 confirmations (~20 min). Coinbase rewards lock for 60 blocks (~2 h).
RandomX — CPU mining for everyone
Monero's proof-of-work is deliberately optimized for ordinary CPUs and resistant to ASIC farms — four independent audits (Trail of Bits, Kudelski, X41, QuarksLab) found no shortcut. Individuals can mine with hardware they already own; P2Pool keeps even pool mining decentralized.
Dynamic blocks & tail emission
Blocks grow organically with demand (miners pay a penalty for bloat), so the base layer scales without a mandatory layer-2 — median fees have stayed around $0.01–0.03. Since 2022, emission is a constant 0.6 XMR per block: ~0.84% inflation per year today, monotonically falling toward zero forever. No halving cliffs, no fee-security cliff.
Dandelion++ & onion transports
Transactions "stem" through random relays before broadcasting, masking the origin node. Full nodes can run natively over Tor or I2P — the network has dedicated onion and I2P seed nodes. Wallet-to-node traffic can be fully anonymized.
Audit culture
QuarksLab (2016, 2018), four RandomX audits (2019), CLSAG (2020), and the upcoming FCMP++ upgrade has passed Veridise + Trail of Bits reviews (2026: zero findings). No successful exploit of Monero's cryptography in 12 years.
Network, September 2026
| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Price / market cap | $555 / $10.4 B (#13) | CoinGecko, 2026-09-06 |
| Network hashrate | ≈6.3 GH/s | xmrchain.net, 2026-09-06 |
| Transactions / day | ≈28,000 | 100-block sample, xmrchain.net API |
| Median fee | ≈0.000044 XMR ≈ $0.025 | 3,915-tx sample, 2026-09-06 |
| Circulating supply | 18,800,846 XMR | CoinGecko, 2026-09-06 |
| Blockchain size | ≈280 GB (prunable) | monero-project/monero README |
What's next: FCMP++
Full-Chain Membership Proofs
The largest cryptographic change in Monero's history is in public beta (stressnet since May 2026): ring signatures get replaced by zero-knowledge-style membership proofs over the entire output set — every spend hides among all coins ever created, not just 15 decoys. Includes CARROT, a new address protocol. No mainnet date committed yet; audits so far: clean.
Honest caveats
Monero's privacy is strong but not magical: network-level adversaries running spy nodes are a real research topic (run your own node over Tor), supply auditability is cryptographically-assured rather than trivially-visible like Bitcoin's, and the curves are not post-quantum — same as Bitcoin and Ethereum today. We state these plainly on every comparison page.
Go deeper
- getmonero.org — official site, docs, roadmap
- monerodocs.org — technical walkthrough of every component
- Monero Observer — protocol upgrades & ecosystem news
- Monero library — papers, books, Moneropedia
All numbers on this page carry an "as of 2026-09-06" date and were verified against live network APIs the same day.