Swap Monero (XMR)

Monero is a proof-of-work chain with a 2-minute block target and a ledger that does not show amounts, senders or receivers. For a sender the three facts that matter are the block time, the 10-block lock on received coins, and what an explorer can and cannot show. Sources were read on 14 October 2026: getmonero.org and the Monero source on github.com.

Blocks: every 2 minutes on average

The source sets DIFFICULTY_TARGET_V2 to 120 seconds, and the difficulty is re-tuned continuously so that blocks keep that average. As on any proof-of-work chain, single gaps vary: a block can come in twenty seconds or in eight minutes. Mining uses RandomX, an algorithm written so that ordinary processors mine competitively.

Confirmations and the swap

The route data this site is built from waits for 5 confirmations on an XMR deposit. Five blocks at 2 minutes plus a minute of processing gives 11–24 minutes — on schedule at the low end, a run of slow blocks at the high end. A swap into XMR depends on the other network: 2–5 minutes from TRON or Solana, 4–10 from Ethereum, 21–44 from Bitcoin.

The 10-block lock

Received XMR cannot be spent for 10 blocks. The number is CRYPTONOTE_DEFAULT_TX_SPENDABLE_AGE in the source, the same for every transaction; a sender cannot shorten it. Wallets show the coins as balance at once and as unlocked balance after about 20 minutes. This matters in one direction here: if you want to swap XMR that just arrived, the wallet will refuse until the lock passes. BTC to XMR step by step walks through a swap that ends in this wait.

Dynamic block size

Monero has no fixed block limit. A block larger than the median of recent blocks is allowed, but the miner's reward is reduced by a penalty that grows with the excess; the long-term median is taken over 100,000 blocks (the source's CRYPTONOTE_LONG_TERM_BLOCK_WEIGHT_WINDOW_SIZE). Fees therefore stay low in ordinary weeks and rise only when the chain is genuinely busy; a wallet's default fee level is enough for a swap deposit.

What the ledger shows

Ring signatures hide which output is spent, stealth addresses give each payment a one-time destination, and RingCT hides the amount. The explorer shows that a transaction with a given hash is in a block, its size and fee, and nothing about who paid whom how much. That is the point of the coin, and it changes how a swap is checked — see the Explorer section.

The one number to plan around. Eleven to twenty-four minutes for a deposit, then up to twenty for the payout to unlock in the receiving wallet. Nothing here is slow by failure; it is the chain's design.

Three forms, one network, and no memo field anywhere. The lengths were checked in Moneropedia on 14 October 2026 and the prefixes in the Monero source.

The source sets three network prefixes — 18, 42 and 19 for mainnet — which is why primary addresses begin with 4, subaddresses with 8 and integrated addresses with 4 again but run longer. All three carry a checksum, and the form checks it.

Which one to give

1. Your own wallet: the address on its Receive screen. Modern wallets show a subaddress (8…) by default and offer a fresh one for each payment, so that two payments to you cannot be linked on the chain. Either 4… or 8… works for a payout; 8… is the better habit. Monero subaddresses, integrated addresses and payment IDs is the long version.
2. An exchange: the address on its XMR deposit page. Some exchanges give an integrated address of 106 characters, which carries the ID that tells your deposit apart; paste the whole thing. Others give a subaddress per customer. Neither needs anything typed into a separate field.
3. Another person: ask for the address and read the first and last four characters back. Ninety-five characters are long enough that a glance is not a check.

No payment ID field

Long payment IDs — a separate 64-character string — were removed from the network in release 0.15 in 2019. The form has no field for one, and a service that still asks for one is asking for something the chain no longer accepts. The only payment ID left is the short one inside an integrated address, and it travels with the address.

What the form accepts

For an XMR payout: a mainnet address of 95 characters starting with 4 or 8, or an integrated address of 106 characters, with a valid checksum. Testnet and stagenet addresses carry other prefixes and fail. There is no XMR token on another network, so a 0x… or T… address is never right.

Addresses in a private ledger

Because of stealth addresses, the address you give never appears on the chain. The payout creates a one-time output that only your wallet's view key can recognise. So an explorer cannot confirm that a payout reached your address; your wallet can, by scanning the chain with its keys. The Explorer section says how to check a payout anyway.

A Monero explorer answers a narrower question than other explorers: does a transaction with this hash exist, and in which block. The status page links the XMR side of a swap to monerohash.com; getmonero.org's own site and other explorers show the same fields. Read on 14 October 2026.

The transaction page shows the hash, the block height and timestamp (or "in the pool"), the number of confirmations, the fee, the size in bytes, the number of inputs and outputs, the ring members of each input, and the output public keys. It does not show the amount, the sender or the receiver — those are hidden by RingCT, ring signatures and stealth addresses.

A deposit you sent

1. Copy the hash from your wallet. Monero wallets list it under the transaction's details.
2. Open it on the explorer. Not found means the wallet did not broadcast it, usually because it was not synced; let it sync and resend.
3. The amount is not shown, so the explorer cannot confirm you sent the right figure. The wallet's own record and the status page can: the swap matches the deposit by its one-time output, and the status page reports the amount it recognised.
4. Watch the confirmations. The status page updates on its own at 5.

Proving a payment

Monero wallets can produce a transaction key or a proof that shows a specific transaction paid a specific address. That is what you would hand to support if a deposit were in dispute: the hash and the proof, from the wallet that sent it. The explorer alone proves nothing about the amount or the destination.

A payout you received

The status page shows the payout hash when the payout is sent. The explorer confirms that the transaction exists and when it was mined. Your wallet is the only thing that can confirm it was paid to you: once it has scanned the block, the payout appears as balance, and 10 blocks later as unlocked balance. If the wallet has not seen it an hour after the explorer shows the block, the usual reason is that the wallet is not synced to that height, or was restored from seed with a restore height later than the block — rescan from the payout's block height.

Reading the ring

Each input lists 16 ring members: the real output being spent and 15 decoys taken from the chain. Nothing on the page says which is which. If you see your own earlier output listed as a ring member of a transaction you did not make, nothing has happened to it — it was chosen as a decoy, which is how every output on the chain is used.

What a block explorer shows about a swap compares this with the transparent chains; Reading a swap status page explains the stages.

Monero removes some mistakes (no wrong network, no memo) and adds its own, mostly about timing and about wallets that are not synced. Nothing here lands on the wrong chain.

The lock, from both ends

A swap from XMR needs coins that are already unlocked; a swap into XMR pays coins that will be locked for 10 blocks in your wallet. Plan both: about 20 minutes before you can resend a payout, and no way to send a deposit from coins that arrived in the last 20 minutes. The lock is the protocol's, not the wallet's — it cannot be switched off.

Sync and restore height

Monero wallets scan the chain with the view key rather than asking a server for a balance. A wallet that is behind does not know about recent payouts and cannot build a valid transaction. On a fresh restore the wallet asks for a restore height; set it earlier than any payment you expect, or the scan skips it.

Less than the minimum

A deposit under the route's minimum cannot be processed as a swap, because the payout fee has to fit inside it. XMR's own fee is small, so the minimum on a route from XMR is driven mostly by the payout network: lower for XMR → USDT TRC-20 than for XMR → USDT ERC-20. Minimums, maximums and network fees on small swaps shows where to read it.

Exchanges that no longer list XMR

A number of exchanges have removed XMR over the years. Their old deposit addresses are not safe destinations, and a payout to one may be unrecoverable. Check the exchange's current page before giving its address; this is the single most common reason people swap XMR address to address instead.

Monero upgrades by scheduled hard fork, roughly once a year in its early life and less often since. Each one has changed something a sender can see. Dates come from getmonero.org's release posts and FAQ and from the Monero source, read on 14 October 2026.

Tail emission, 2022. Monero's main emission curve ran out in 2022, and from block 2,641,623 the block reward has been a flat 0.6 XMR — 0.3 XMR per minute in the source's FINAL_SUBSIDY_PER_MINUTE. There is therefore no maximum supply; the yearly addition is fixed in coins and shrinks as a share. For a sender it means miners are always paid, so fees need never carry the whole cost of security. Moneropedia's tail-emission entry dates the start to the end of May 2022; the FAQ gives the block and 9 June. The block number is the exact one.

Ring size 16, 2022. Release 0.18.0.0 was announced on 19 July 2022 for the network upgrade of 13 August; it raised the ring size from 11 to 16, replaced Bulletproofs with Bulletproofs+, added view tags that make wallet scanning faster, and changed fees. Every transaction since has 16 ring members per input. Moneropedia's ring-size entry still describes the earlier value of 11; the release post and the source are current.

Unlock times, 2026. A seldom-used feature let a sender lock the coins they sent until a chosen block height. The May 2026 post says it will be removed at consensus with FCMP++, that nodes already stop relaying such transactions, and that transactions created after 1 June 2026 with a lock past the fork unlock at the fork. The protocol's own 10-block lock on every receipt is a different thing and stays.

FCMP++. Full-chain membership proofs would replace the 16-member ring with a proof over all outputs on the chain. On 14 October 2026 it was running on a beta stressnet — the developers' proposals on repo.getmonero.org describe launching and restarting it — and no mainnet fork date had been set. Nothing changes for a sender until a release post on getmonero.org names a date; wallets and addresses are expected to keep working.

What has not changed. Two-minute blocks, 95-character addresses, 12 decimals, the 10-block lock, and a ledger that shows no amounts. A wallet from 2020 synced today sends and receives as it did then.

Both are coins people reach for when they want a transfer that does not publish its details, and this site pays out both. They do it in different ways, and the differences show up in what you give as an address and what an explorer shows afterwards. Figures come from getmonero.org, the Monero source and the Zcash improvement proposals, read on 14 October 2026, and from the route data this site uses.

Privacy by default versus by choice. Every Monero transaction uses the same hiding; there is no transparent kind. Zcash keeps Bitcoin's transparent model and adds shielded transactions beside it, and a single transaction can cross between the two. For a payout that means: an XMR payout is private however you receive it; a ZEC payout to a t1… address is public, and one to a u1… address lands wherever the receiving wallet's unified address directs it. Zcash address types: what a swap pays to goes through the cases.

Time. Zcash's 75-second blocks make six confirmations faster than Monero's five: 9–19 minutes against 11–24. Monero then adds its 10-block lock before a received payout can be re-sent; Zcash has nothing like it.

Addresses. A Monero address is long and belongs to one of three forms; a Zcash address names its own kind by prefix. The form checks both. Neither has a memo field, and neither has a token version on another network.

Where each is listed. Exchanges have removed XMR more often than ZEC. Which services take which coin today is in Monero in 2026: where it can be swapped; on this site both are paid out to any address of the right form.