Monero Price Tracker (XMR) & Whale Tracker

What is Monero

Monero is a cryptocurrency built so that nobody can see who paid whom, or how much. Every transaction on Bitcoin and Ethereum is public forever; on Monero the sender, the receiver and the amount are hidden by default, not as an option. It launched in April 2014 as a fork of Bytecoin under the name BitMonero, and the community that took it over within weeks has run it as an open, volunteer-led project ever since. There is no company, no foundation with a token allocation and no pre-mine.

The coin is XMR. It is mined, spent and traded like other cryptocurrencies, but because balances cannot be traced, every XMR is interchangeable with every other, a property economists call fungibility. That is the reason privacy advocates, journalists, people in countries with capital controls and, less flatteringly, dark-net markets have all settled on it. The live price, market cap and supply at the top of this page refresh automatically.

Development is coordinated by a core team of pseudonymous and named contributors and funded through a community crowdfunding system rather than a treasury. Monero's research lab publishes the cryptography behind each upgrade.

How Monero works

Three technologies hide the three parts of a transaction. Ring signatures mix the real input with decoys drawn from the blockchain, so an observer sees sixteen possible senders and cannot tell which one is real. Stealth addresses generate a fresh one-time address for every payment, so a recipient's public address never appears on-chain. Ring Confidential Transactions, added in 2017, encrypt the amounts while still letting the network verify that inputs equal outputs.

Bulletproofs in 2018 shrank the size of those encrypted amounts by around 80 percent, which cut fees, and Dandelion++ obscures the IP address a transaction is broadcast from. Monero also changed its mining algorithm to RandomX in November 2019, a design that favours ordinary CPUs over specialised mining chips, so anyone with a laptop can mine and the hash rate stays spread across many small miners.

Blocks arrive every two minutes and their size adjusts dynamically with demand rather than being capped, which keeps fees low even during busy periods. The next major upgrade, known as FCMP++, replaces ring signatures with a proof that draws on the entire set of outputs on the chain, closing the remaining statistical attacks on sender privacy.

Supply and tokenomics

Monero has no hard cap, by design. The initial emission schedule distributed about 18.1 million XMR over its first eight years, and since mid-2022 the network pays a fixed tail emission of 0.6 XMR per block, roughly 158,000 coins a year. That keeps miners paid forever without depending on transaction fees, and the resulting inflation rate falls below one percent and keeps declining as the supply grows.

There was no pre-mine, no founder allocation and no investor round. Every coin in existence was mined. The circulating supply figure shown above is a best estimate, because shielded amounts mean the number cannot be audited by simply reading the chain, though the emission rule itself is enforced by every node.

History and milestones

Monero gained its first large audience in 2016 when dark-net markets adopted it, which gave it a reputation it has worked to broaden ever since. Major upgrades arrived in 2017 and 2018, and the Monero Research Lab's work on bulletproofs was later adopted by other projects. In 2020 the US Internal Revenue Service offered a bounty for tools to trace Monero, and firms including Chainalysis have claimed partial success, though no public demonstration has broken the current protocol.

Exchange pressure has been the main story of recent years. Binance delisted XMR in February 2024, Kraken removed it for European customers, and OKX and others followed in jurisdictions with strict anti-money-laundering rules. The European Union's rules that take effect in 2027 bar regulated exchanges from listing privacy coins at all. Against that backdrop, Monero's price rose strongly in 2025 as the privacy narrative returned, driven in part by renewed interest in Zcash and by users looking for alternatives to surveilled chains.

What people use Monero for

Private payments are the whole point. Freelancers who do not want clients to see their other income, donors to causes that governments dislike, people in countries where a public transaction history is dangerous, and traders who do not want their exchange withdrawals tracked all use it for the same reason. Several privacy-focused VPN providers, hosting companies and online stores accept XMR directly.

Monero is also the settlement coin of choice on peer-to-peer markets. Haveno, a decentralised exchange that launched in 2024 after LocalMonero closed, matches buyers and sellers who pay in bank transfers or cash without a central operator. Atomic swaps between Bitcoin and Monero let users move between the two chains without an exchange account.

Where to buy and trade Monero

XMR is listed on Kraken for non-European customers, on KuCoin, Gate, MEXC and several other centralised exchanges, and on instant-swap services such as Trocador, which route to whichever venue has liquidity. Availability varies by country, and listings have been shrinking rather than growing, so check that a venue serves your region before depositing.

For self-custody the official Monero GUI and CLI wallets, Feather and Cake Wallet are the standard choices, with Ledger and Trezor hardware support. Running your own node gives the strongest privacy; using a remote node is faster to set up but reveals your IP address to that node unless you route through Tor.

Risks to understand

Regulation is the central risk. More delistings are likely, and holding or using XMR may draw scrutiny in some jurisdictions even when the purpose is legal. Thinner exchange support means wider spreads and harder on-ramps than for large transparent coins.

Privacy is strong but not perfect; academic papers have found statistical weaknesses in older transactions, and upgrades exist precisely because the research is ongoing. XMR is volatile, the project depends on volunteer funding, and losing a wallet seed is as final as with any other coin. This page is a reference for the data above, not investment advice.

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