The short answer
Monero is built so that an outside observer cannot see who paid whom, or how much. Most other coins, including Bitcoin and Ethereum, have transparent chains. That does not mean nothing can ever be learned about a Monero user. The Monero FAQ says that full anonymity does not exist. It also says that some information may still be inferred through Monero’s privacy layers.
Leaks can come from two places. One is the chain itself, where each spend still hides among a limited group of outputs. The other is everything around the chain: the accounts you use, the network you connect from, when you move coins, and which addresses you hand out.
Why this matters for everyday money
On Bitcoin, anyone can see the balance and all transactions of any address. If you share one Bitcoin address, for a salary, a donation page or a refund, anyone who has it can read its full history and balance.
Monero works differently. All transactions on the network are private, and there is no way to send a transparent one by mistake. Payments to your published address cannot be linked back to it on the chain. So someone who pays you cannot use your address to look up your balance or your other payments.
What Monero hides, and how
Monero uses three tools. Each one covers one part of a payment.
Ring signatures hide the sender
When you spend, your wallet signs with a ring. The ring holds the output you are really spending plus other outputs pulled from the chain as decoys. The signature does not show which member of the ring is yours.
The ring size has grown over time. The network required a minimum of 3 in March 2016, then 5 in September 2017, 7 in April 2018 and 11 in October 2018. Since the network upgrade of August 2022 it is 16. So every input points to 16 possible sources, and only one is real.
Stealth addresses hide the receiver
For each payment, the sender’s wallet creates a new one-time address on your behalf. Your published address is not what gets written on the chain. Only the sender and you can tell where the payment went. Two payments to the same published address still look unrelated to everyone else.
RingCT hides the amount
Ring Confidential Transactions (RingCT) hide how much was sent. It went live in January 2017, at block 1220516. Since September 2017 every transaction must use it.
What anyone can still see on the chain
Open any recent transaction on a Monero block explorer and you will find:
- the transaction ID, its size and its fee
- how many inputs and outputs it has
- the 16 ring members of each input, with the block and age of each one
- the one-time output addresses, with the amounts shown as unknown
- the block it was included in, which gives a rough time
None of this names a sender or a receiver, or shows an amount. It is still data. The number of outputs, the fee, the time and the ages of ring members can all support a guess when they are combined with outside information.
What research has found
Monero’s privacy has been tested in public, and the early results showed real weaknesses.
In 2017, Kumar and colleagues studied the chain. In 87% of the cases they looked at, they could identify the real output being spent. For over 98% of the inputs they could trace, the real output was the one that had been on the chain for the shortest time.
A second team, Möser and colleagues, first posted its study in 2017 and published the final version in 2018. In their data, most inputs had no decoys at all. Those inputs showed which coins were already spent, so the same coins could be ruled out when they appeared as decoys in other rings. This “chain reaction” let the authors find the real input for about 62% of the inputs that did have decoys, not counting RingCT inputs. They also found that the newest ring member was usually the real one. They estimated that this guess was right about 80% of the time. The study warned that people who made sensitive transactions before February 2017 were at significant risk of being traced after the fact.
Some of these problems were already being fixed. The minimum ring size from March 2016 ended spending with no decoys. The 2018 study notes that RingCT inputs were generally immune to the chain reaction, because RingCT started after that minimum. The age problem needed a different fix. Today Monero’s wallet software picks decoys with the same gamma curve that the 2018 study fitted to real spending times.
A ring of 16 is still a small group, though. In 2025, researchers published a statistical test for Monero transactions and described an attack on sender privacy built on it. They note that the size of the group affects how well such tests work. One known pattern is called EAE. If you send to and receive from the same party again and again, and that party wants to follow your funds, it may be able to make a statistical guess about where they came from or went. A Monero community research fund calls EAE one of Monero’s privacy weak points.
The planned fix is Full-Chain Membership Proofs. They would replace rings and prove that the spent output is one of any output on the chain, not one of 16. The project roadmap lists this as an ongoing task. In May 2026 the project said no date had been set for that upgrade. In September 2026, transactions on the network still use rings of 16.
Where your privacy usually leaks
Accounts at services
If you get XMR from a service where you have an account, that service knows who you are and which address it paid. The Monero documentation says that if you have an account with a service, your payouts are already linked in its database. The same applies when you send XMR back to such an account. Monero cannot make a service forget what you told it.
The same logic applies to any swap. For each order, the parties that handle it can link the deposit to the payout address you gave.
Your IP address
Your wallet talks to a node. If you use someone else’s remote node, its operator can see which IP address a transaction came from. It cannot see the receiver or the amount. The Monero project advises running your own node for the most privacy.
Since 2020, Monero’s node software has used Dandelion++. It changes how new transactions spread across the network, which makes it much harder to link a transaction to an IP address. For more protection, Monero can send your transactions over Tor or I2P. The developers still call that support experimental, and they list leaks that remain, such as clock timestamps. Keeping your system clock accurate makes that leak harder to use.
Timing and amounts
Amounts are hidden on the chain, but not from the services you use. A service that pays you knows the amount and the time. A service you pay next knows the same about your deposit. If both records can be compared, a similar amount moved minutes later is an easy match. The less your incoming and outgoing payments look alike in size and time, the less such a comparison shows. The research above also showed that a coin’s age can give the real input away.
Reused addresses
Anyone you give your address to can recognize it again. If two payers compare notes, a shared address links them to the same person. Monero wallets can create subaddresses for this. The documentation says to create a new subaddress for each payout, so that a payer cannot link your payouts together. It also names one exception, the Janus attack, where a service actively tries to link them. For full separation, the documentation points to a separate wallet with its own seed.
View keys and explorers
A private view key lets its holder see every incoming transaction to your address. It does not reliably show what you spent, so a balance shown with a view key alone should not be trusted. Share it only with someone who needs to check what you received.
Web block explorers can decode your payments, but you must type in your address and view key. That server then sees both. Your own wallet can do the same check without sending them anywhere.
To prove one payment, you give three things: the transaction ID, the receiver’s address and the transaction key. The person checking learns how much that one transaction sent to that address. Each transaction has its own key, so this does not reveal your other payments.
A practical checklist
- Keep XMR in a wallet you control, not in an account at a service.
- Use a new subaddress for each payer and each swap.
- Run your own node, or reach a node over Tor or I2P.
- Keep your seed and spend key private. Share a view key only with someone who needs it.
- Do not post an address next to your name unless you want the two linked.
- Remember that the other side of every payment sees what you sent them.
How this applies to a swap
When you swap Bitcoin to Monero, your Bitcoin deposit is a normal Bitcoin transaction and stays public on that chain. The swap does not change that record. The XMR you get arrives at a one-time address on the Monero chain, and from there Monero’s protections apply. Give a fresh subaddress from your own wallet.
Your deposit goes to an address controlled by our liquidity partner until your new coins are sent. A swap can be held for checks, as Risk and screening explains. To go the other way, see Monero to Bitcoin swaps. For how Monero works, how to receive it safely and common questions, read our Monero coin guide.