First published 25 April 2020. Expanded in October 2026 for the tail emission and the ring size the chain uses now. Monero is a proof-of-work ledger built so that a payment does not publish who sent it, who received it, or how much moved. XMR is the coin. Privacy is the default, not a switch you remember to turn on. That is the difference from Bitcoin, and it is the difference from Zcash, where a transparent send is still a normal, public send.
What is Zcash (ZEC)? is the optional-privacy cousin. This page will not teach you how to hide a payment from an investigator, and it will not teach you how to unhide someone else’s. It is a map of what the coin is.
Where it came from
In April 2014 a group of developers launched a new chain from the CryptoNote design, first under the name BitMonero, then Monero. It was not a split of Bitcoin’s history. Holding bitcoin did not give you XMR. CryptoNote’s own earlier coin had a credibility problem about a premine. Monero’s answer was a fresh ledger, not a rebrand of that coin.
The privacy pieces arrived in layers. Stealth addresses mean a recipient publishes one address and each payment lands on a one-time destination, so the public list does not show a reused account the way Bitcoin often does. Ring signatures mean a spend is signed as one of a set of possible coins. The ring size is 16, so fifteen of them are decoys. RingCT, from January 2017, hides the amount. Those are the mechanics. They are probabilistic, not a magic cloak, and this page stops at naming them.
Mining, and a subsidy that does not end
Since November 2019 the proof of work has been RandomX, built to run on ordinary processors rather than on the machines that mine Bitcoin. Blocks are aimed at about two minutes. The main emission curve finished at the end of May 2022. After that, each block mints a tail of 0.6 XMR, plus fees, and the code does not take that tail to zero. There is no 21 million cap. The project’s reason is miner pay: if the subsidy vanished and fees were competed away, the incentive to add blocks could vanish with it. A tail is inflation that gets smaller as a percentage as the supply grows. It is not a yield paid to holders.
New coins you receive are not spendable in the next breath. Wallets wait about ten confirmations, on the order of twenty minutes, before they will spend them. That is a protocol rule against a short reorganisation, not an exchange being slow. An exchange can wait longer still. Waiting is not a loss.
Addresses, and venues that say no
A standard address is a long string that starts with 4. A subaddress starts with 8. Neither is an Ethereum address, and neither is a Bitcoin address. Some old deposit pages still ask for a payment ID beside the address. If the page shows one, copy it. If you are sending to a subaddress the venue gave you, there is often no extra field, and inventing one does not help. The wrong network is still the wrong city.
Many exchanges will not list XMR, or will not accept a deposit. That is a company rule about compliance. It does not stop the chain, and it does not make the coin a different asset on the venues that still have it. A site that offers to “swap your XMR” and asks for a recovery phrase is not a venue. A wallet signature is not a handshake. Nothing here is an instruction to buy, mine, or move XMR.
