Why privacy

The quiet thing money used to keep

Pay cash for a coffee and the world gets no copy of the receipt. Nobody learns where you work, what you earn, who you give to, or what medicine you take. That quiet was always part of an ordinary life. Most digital money traded it away and never asked you first. This page is about getting it back. Calmly, and without lying to you about what it costs.

01 / A ledger that never forgets

A ledger that never forgets

On most blockchains every payment is written down in public and kept forever. Anyone can read the sender, the receiver, and the amount. The moment they learn one of your addresses, they can tie all of it to you. Your salary, your rent, your donations, your medical bills, the people you pay: employers, advertisers, strangers, and governments can reconstruct the lot. A second harm follows the first. When coins carry a visible history, some get treated as tainted for where they have been, even when you had nothing to do with it. Money stops being equal.

Touch a row: one address pulls its whole history out. Two rows here never met the thread. Find them.

02 / Privacy is a right, not a loophole

Privacy is a right, not a loophole

The right to a private life was recognized long before crypto. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, says no one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with their privacy, family, home, or correspondence. Money is part of that private life. The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that financial records reveal your friends, your medical concerns, and your political beliefs, and that a handful of payment intermediaries can quietly decide which causes are allowed to receive money at all. The Human Rights Foundation works on exactly this, so that dissidents, journalists, and nonprofits under authoritarian regimes can take donations and pay people without censorship, confiscation, or surveillance.

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age.
Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto, 1993

03 / How Monero keeps a payment private

How Monero keeps a payment private

Monero is digital cash that hides the details of a payment by default, while the network still confirms the payment is real and no coins were forged. A few plain ideas do the work. Stealth addresses: the sender makes a fresh one-time address for every payment, so what lands on the public ledger cannot be traced back to you. Ring signatures: your signature is mixed in with a group of others, so an outsider cannot tell which one actually authorized the payment. Ring Confidential Transactions hide the amount while the math still proves the sums balance. Dandelion++ changes how a payment first travels the network, so it is harder to pin to your computer. Because every payment is private, every coin stays equal, the way one banknote is the same as any other.

One of these eleven really did send the money. Tap the one who signed.

03 / What the chain actually keeps

What the chain actually keeps

Here is one payment, written the way a public chain writes one: who paid, who was paid, how much, and which machine announced it. Monero keeps almost none of that. Close each layer and watch what is left.

An interactive diagram of a payment with four privacy layers. Each layer can be closed, and the text beside it says what that layer hides.

One payment, as a public ledger would record it

Signed by one of sixteen

Your signature is submitted beside fifteen decoys taken from the chain’s own past. The network confirms one of them is real. Nobody, us included, can say which.

A fresh address every time

The address written to the chain has never been used and never will be again. The address you hand out is never the one that appears.

Proven, not shown

The amount is replaced by a commitment. The network still checks that no coins were conjured out of nothing — it does the arithmetic without ever learning the number.

The first hop is not the source

Before it is broadcast, the payment is passed quietly along a short line of peers. Someone watching the network sees where it bloomed, not where it began.

That is the whole record. It stays on the chain forever, and it says nothing about you.

Hover a layer to preview it. Click to keep it closed. Tap a layer to close it.

04 / Twelve years, and the floor only went up

Twelve years, and the floor only went up

Every entry here is a consensus change you can check against a node today. The block heights are the ones in Monero’s own hard fork table, not ours.

  1. Apr 2014 version 1 block 1

    It starts without a company

    April 2014, a pre-announced launch of the CryptoNote reference code. No premine, no instamine, and no slice of the block reward set aside for developers. When the original founder pushed changes the community would not take, the community forked away and kept building.

  2. Jan 2017 version 4 block 1 220 516

    Amounts begin to disappear

    Ring Confidential Transactions arrive. Until now the sums were public; from here the network proves the arithmetic balances without publishing the number it balanced.

  3. Sep 2017 version 6 block 1 400 000

    Privacy stops being a choice

    The old transparent transaction type is switched off for everyone. This is the decision that separates Monero from every chain where privacy is a setting: when only some people hide, hiding is itself a signal.

  4. Oct 2018 version 8 block 1 685 555

    The proofs shrink, the fees follow

    Bulletproofs cut a confidential proof to a fraction of its former size, and fees fell with it. Privacy that costs a fortune is privacy for the wealthy; this is the upgrade that made it ordinary. The ring is fixed at eleven members in the same change.

  5. Nov 2019 version 12 block 1 978 433

    Mining returns to ordinary computers

    RandomX is tuned so a general-purpose processor stays competitive with purpose-built hardware. It is not a privacy feature. It is what stops the set of people who produce blocks from narrowing to whoever can afford the machines.

  6. Aug 2022 version 15 block 2 688 888

    Sixteen, and faster wallets

    The ring grows to sixteen members and view tags let a wallet scan the chain far faster. This is the most recent consensus change on mainnet; everything since has been point releases.

  7. Feb 2024

    The year the exchanges left

    In February 2024 the largest exchange delisted it, and that October it was withdrawn from the European Economic Area under MiCA. The network did not pause, did not fork, and did not ask. It kept producing a block every couple of minutes throughout. That is the difference between money that needs permission and money that does not.

  8. The upgrade that is not here yet not in the chain

    Full-chain membership proofs would retire the ring of sixteen and prove a spend against every output on the chain instead. The work is funded, built, and under audit on testnet — and it is not in the chain. The hard fork table still ends at version sixteen. Anyone telling you it already shipped is selling something.

Check the table yourself

So is it the best?

For the one thing this page is about — letting an ordinary payment stay ordinary — yes, and not because of a slogan. It is the only major chain where privacy was never optional, so there is no smaller crowd to be picked out of. It has no company behind it and no premine to defend. Its rules have been rewritten sixteen times and never once in the direction of showing more. It is also slower than a transparent chain, its proofs are heavier, and its next big upgrade is late. We would rather tell you that than sell you the version where everything is perfect.

05 / Zcash, and why privacy coins are not all alike

Zcash, and why privacy coins are not all alike

Zcash reaches the same goal by a different road. It grew out of Bitcoin's code and adds a kind of cryptography called a zero-knowledge proof, so the network can confirm a payment is valid without seeing who paid whom or how much. Zcash has two kinds of addresses: shielded ones, where the details are encrypted, and transparent ones, which are public like Bitcoin. The privacy is real, but with Zcash it is a choice you make for each payment rather than something always on. That difference matters. Monero hides sender, receiver, and amount on every transaction by default. Zcash gives strong privacy when you use its shielded pool. Some coins sold as private are weaker than either. Privacy coin is not one uniform thing, and it is worth knowing which protection you are actually getting.

Anyone can read: a payment happened. Nothing else.

06 / Wallets that hold private money

Wallets that hold private money

You do not have to take our word for which wallets to trust. For Monero, getmonero.org itself points people to Cake Wallet, Feather, and Monerujo on its own downloads page, alongside the official Monero GUI and CLI. We list the same set, plus the mainstream wallets most people already use for everything else.

For Monero

Multi-chain

07 / Who privacy is actually for

Who privacy is actually for

Privacy technology is not built for criminals. Like a curtain, a sealed envelope, or cash in a pocket, it is for ordinary people living ordinary lives. It is the person taking a salary without their whole income and spending laid open on a public ledger. It is paying for therapy or medication with the discretion you would expect from cash. It is giving to a cause or a place of worship without that gift becoming a permanent public file. It is journalists and their sources, human rights defenders, and people under authoritarian governments who can still be paid after the state freezes their accounts. It is someone leaving an abusive partner who needs their money out of sight of the person tracking them. The same protection covers the ordinary and the vulnerable alike.

Five ordinary lives, all sealed shut. Not one of them was a criminal — that was never the point.

08 / The hard part, said honestly

The hard part, said honestly

We are not going to pretend this is simple. Privacy can be misused, and some people do real harm with it. That is true of cash, of a sealed envelope, of a locked door, of encryption itself: the same protection that shields the ordinary and the vulnerable can be abused by a few. Regulators are not wrong to care about that harm. But the answer to a tool that can be misused has never been to ban it for everyone, or to watch everyone all the time on the chance that someone is guilty. That trades one harm for a larger one, and it punishes the many for the acts of the few. We think the honest middle is the old one: privacy as the default, investigation when there is real cause, under the rule of law. Not prohibition. Not total surveillance. The mistake is swinging to either extreme.

09 / Where SwapSS stands, plainly

Where SwapSS stands, plainly

We treat financial privacy as a basic right, and we will not pretend it is something to be ashamed of. We also will not pretend it is the same as lawlessness, because it is not. SwapSS still screens orders for compliance. An order that gets flagged is paused and reviewed, not pushed through. Using a private asset does not switch that off. Two more honest notes. Privacy assets are never instant. They settle on their own networks at their own pace, so expect a wait, not a snap of the fingers. And we do not give legal, tax, or sanctions advice. How privacy money fits your situation, and the law where you live, is yours to check. What we offer is the everyday discretion you already expect from cash, run honestly.

10 / The institutions behind this

The institutions behind this

Every claim on this page traces back to a primary source: the projects that build the technology and the rights organizations that defend the principle. Read them in their own words, not ours.

Read it from the source. You do not have to take our word for any of this. Below are the primary references, the projects and the rights organizations themselves, so you can read the technology and the principle straight from the people who maintain them.

When you are ready

If keeping your money quiet feels normal to you, that is because it is. When you want to exchange, SwapSS is here, with privacy treated as the right it is and compliance kept where it belongs.

Exchange privately