How to use Monero Six steps to private money.

How to use Monero comes down to six steps: get a wallet, back up its 25 words, get some XMR, then receive, send and wait for confirmations. The first three happen once. After that, Monero works like cash you can hand over the internet: you share an address, someone pays it, and twenty minutes later the money is fully yours to spend.

This guide walks the whole path, from an empty screen to a payment you can prove. It also covers the parts most guides skip: which address to share, why your balance sometimes looks frozen, and what to do when a wallet will not sync.

Let's get started.

If you have used a banking app, you already know most of what Monero asks of you. You have a balance, an address people pay into (like an account number), and a send button. Three things are different, and they are worth knowing before you touch any money.

• You are the bank. Nobody can freeze your wallet, and nobody can reset it for you. Your 25 recovery words are the only spare key.
• Payments are final. There is no chargeback and no support line that can pull money back.
• Privacy is the default. The blockchain hides who paid, who got paid and how much. You do not switch anything on.

That last point is why people choose Monero in the first place. If you want the background first, our guide to what Monero is and how it hides payments covers it in plain English. You do not need it to follow this guide, any more than you need to understand card networks to pay with a card.

The map at the top of this page shows the whole journey. Steps 1 to 3 happen once. Step 2, the backup, is the one that cannot wait: once a device is lost, it is too late to write the words down. It gets its own section in the next chapter.

Here are the numbers worth remembering. Every one of them comes up again later in this guide.

Average time per block

~2 min

Confirmations before you can spend

10

Until received XMR is spendable

~20 min

First character of an address

4 or 8

Recovery words to write down

25

A Monero wallet does not hold coins the way a purse holds cash. The coins live on the blockchain. The wallet holds the keys that prove the coins are yours, shows your balance, and builds payments. That is why the most important question about any wallet is simple: who has the keys?

Pick a non-custodial wallet, meaning the keys are created and kept on your own device. A custodial service (an exchange account, for example) holds the keys for you, which also means it can freeze, lose or limit your money.

Our comparison of the best Monero wallets goes through the options. The official GUI and CLI wallets come from the getmonero.org downloads page, which also explains how to verify the file before you run it. Whatever you choose, reach the site from a bookmark or a link you trust.

If you would rather start with nothing to install, you can create a Monero wallet in your browser with MonkStash. It is free and non-custodial: your keys are generated and encrypted on your device and never sent to a server. You set a wallet password, and you can add an authenticator app code (TOTP) and auto-lock.

Back up your 25 words before anything else

When you create a wallet, it shows you 25 recovery words. Write them on paper, in order, with a pen. This is the most important two minutes of the whole process. If your device dies, is lost or gets wiped, those words rebuild the wallet on any device. Nobody can reset them for you.

• Keep them offline. No photo, no screenshot, no cloud note.
• Keep a second copy in a different place.
• Never type them into a site you reached from an ad, an email or a direct message.

Your wallet password is a different thing. It only unlocks the wallet on one device. The words are the wallet itself. Before you trust a wallet with real money, prove the backup works by restoring it from the words on a second device or a fresh browser profile.

This step depends most on where you live, because the places that sell Monero differ by country and change over time. The main routes are:

• Exchanges. You pay with a card or bank transfer, then withdraw to your own wallet. Most ask for identity verification.
• Peer-to-peer marketplaces. You buy directly from another person. More private, but you need to choose who you trade with carefully.
• Swap services. You send another cryptocurrency and receive XMR at your address. Fees and limits vary.
• Earning it. Freelancers and sellers can ask to be paid in XMR.

Our guide to buying Monero compares these routes and the risks of each. Whichever you pick, the order of operations is the same: create your wallet, back it up, then copy your receiving address into the exchange or service.

One more thing to expect: an exchange may ask for more than 10 confirmations before it credits a deposit, and it may hold a withdrawal for its own checks. That waiting is the exchange's policy, not the Monero network.

Your address is what you give people so they can pay you. A standard Monero address is a string of 95 characters starting with a 4 or an 8. It is safe to share: an address cannot be used to take money from you, and nobody can look up its balance on the blockchain.

Here is the part most new users miss. Monero has three kinds of address, and they all pay into the same wallet. Which one you share changes how much the people paying you can learn about each other.

Why subaddresses are the everyday choice

If you give the same address to your employer, a friend and a client, any two of them could compare notes and learn they paid the same person. Give each one its own subaddress and they cannot. The Monero documentation suggests exactly this: generate a new subaddress for each payer. Your wallet still sees every payment, because all subaddresses come from the same keys.

Integrated addresses are mostly for businesses. They bundle your address with an 8-byte payment ID, so a shop or exchange can match each payment to an order or customer. The same docs recommend subaddresses for individuals. If an exchange gives you an integrated address for a deposit, copy it exactly as shown.

Before you send to any address, you can paste it into our free Monero address validator. It checks that the address is well formed and tells you which kind it is.

Receiving is the easy half. You never need to be online when someone pays you. You only need to give them an address, and your wallet finds the payment the next time it syncs.

1. Open your wallet and find the receive screen

   Most wallets call it Receive. In the MonkStash wallet it is the receive card on the dashboard, with your address and a QR code.

2. Make a fresh subaddress for this payer

   Use the new address button. One subaddress per person or purpose keeps payers from linking each other.

3. Share it as text or as a QR code

   Copy the text, or let the sender scan the QR code with their wallet. Either way, ask them to check the first and last characters.

4. Wait for the payment and its confirmations

   It usually appears within seconds as unconfirmed. It becomes spendable after 10 confirmations, about 20 minutes.

What a Monero QR code contains

A Monero QR code is your address, written in a standard format that starts with monero:. The Monero URI scheme can also carry an amount and a short description, which is how shops show a ready-to-pay code at checkout. The sender scans it and their wallet fills in the details. Scanning only reads the code. It never gives anyone access to your wallet.

Two details trip up beginners. First, your wallet must be synced to see a new payment, so if nothing shows up, check the sync status before you worry. Second, a payment can appear while still locked. That is normal, and chapter 7 explains the wait.

Sending takes about a minute. Your wallet builds and signs the payment on your own device, hides it among decoys, and hands it to the network. You only see four moves:

1. Paste or scan the recipient's address

   Copy it from the person or shop you are paying, or scan their QR code. Never type an address by hand.

2. Enter the amount

   If you scanned a code with an amount in it, the wallet may fill it in. Check it against what you agreed.

3. Review the fee and the total

   A good wallet shows the network fee before you commit. MonkStash shows the fee and the total on a review screen.

4. Confirm, and keep the transaction ID

   After sending, your wallet shows a transaction ID (tx ID). Keep it until the recipient confirms they have the money.

Why your balance drops more than you sent

Monero spends whole earlier payments, like paying with a banknote. If you pay 0.3 XMR from a 1 XMR payment you received, the leftover comes back to you as change. That change is a new payment to yourself, so it follows the same 10-confirmation lock. For about 20 minutes after a send, your spendable balance can look lower than you expect. It unlocks by itself.

Sending to an exchange or a shop

Use exactly the address the service shows you for this deposit or this order, including any integrated address. Some services create a fresh address per order and stop watching it after a time limit, so pay promptly and pay the amount shown.

Monero fees: small, and based on size

Every Monero payment pays a fee to the miners who add it to a block. No company takes a cut. The fee depends on the size of the transaction in bytes, not the amount you send, and on how busy the network is. Sending 0.01 XMR and sending 100 XMR cost about the same, as long as the transactions are a similar size.

In practice the fee is usually a tiny fraction of one XMR. Many wallets let you choose a priority level: a higher priority pays more per byte and matters only when blocks are busy. Because the rate moves, always read the fee your wallet shows on the review screen rather than a number printed in a guide.

How long a Monero payment takes

Monero targets one block every two minutes. The setting is 120 seconds in the source code. A payment moves through four stages:

That 10-block rule is built into the protocol: the same source file sets the spendable age to 10 blocks, and the Monero project's guide for merchants says you need at least 10 confirmations before you can spend the funds. It protects everyone against the chain briefly reorganizing. So "how long does it take?" has two honest answers: seconds to see it, about 20 minutes to spend it.

On Bitcoin you can paste an address into a block explorer and watch its balance. On Monero you cannot, and that is the point. A block explorer can show that a transaction exists, which block it landed in, how many confirmations it has and what fee it paid. It cannot show who sent it, who received it or how much.

Check your own payments

The simplest check is your wallet's history. MonkStash lists each payment with its confirmation count (for example, "Confirming (4 of 10)") and lets you copy its transaction ID. Paste that ID into a block explorer to see the block and confirmations from an independent source.

To let someone else watch your incoming payments without being able to spend, such as an accountant, Monero has a private view key. A view-only wallet built from it sees what comes in. Share it only with people you trust, because it reveals your incoming history.

Prove that you paid someone

Say a seller claims your payment never arrived. You can prove it with three pieces of information, as the official prove-payment guide describes: the transaction ID, the transaction key (tx key) and the recipient's address.

In the official GUI wallet, you get the proof from the transaction history, and the other person checks it under Advanced, Prove/Check. In the CLI wallet the commands are get_tx_key and check_tx_key, and the wallet must be set to save transaction keys before you send. One limit is worth knowing: the CLI reference notes that a proof shows funds were sent to an address, not that they are still unspent. For proving a balance, the CLI has a separate reserve proof.

Few things are as alarming as opening your wallet and seeing 0 XMR. Take a breath. On Monero the money lives on the blockchain, not in the app, so a wrong balance almost always means the wallet has not finished looking. Work through three questions in order.

1. Is the wallet connected?

Your wallet needs a Monero node to read the blockchain. If it says disconnected, or cannot reach the daemon, the usual causes are a node that is down, a wrong port or address, or a wallet pointed at the wrong network (mainnet versus a test network). Switching to another node fixes most cases.

2. Is it fully synced?

A wallet scans every block since its restore height for payments that belong to you. A fresh restore can take a while, and a phone or browser wallet scanning a long history is slower than a desktop. If the blocks-remaining count keeps falling, wait. If it never moves, the node is the usual suspect.

3. Synced, but still zero?

Then check three things. Was the wallet restored with a restore height later than your first payment? If so, it skipped them; restore again with an earlier height. Are the funds just locked for the 10-block wait? And is this the right wallet, network and account? Different recovery words open a different wallet, so make sure these are the words of the wallet that was paid.

Honest answer first: nothing makes you perfectly anonymous. But Monero gets you much closer than most money, and it does the hard part automatically. Every payment hides the sender, the receiver and the amount on the blockchain. What is left is what happens around the blockchain, and that is where your habits come in.

Know what your node can see

If you use someone else's node, it sees your IP address and the transactions your wallet broadcasts through it, though not your keys or your balance. The Monero remote node guide warns that some public nodes are run to try to link IP addresses to transactions. Its recommendation, in order: run your own node, use a remote node you trust, and prefer Tor or I2P connections when privacy matters most.

MonkStash currently reaches the network through our relay server, which forwards requests to public nodes. The relay can see your IP address, and the nodes see the requests and transactions you broadcast; neither sees your keys. Our guides to remote node privacy and running your own node explain the options.

Six habits that cover the gaps

• Use a fresh subaddress per payer. It stops payers from linking you.
• Remember where you bought. An exchange that checked your ID knows it sold you XMR and where it sent it.
• Do not post addresses or screenshots you want kept private. Public is public.
• Share your view key rarely. It reveals every incoming payment.
• Mind your connection. A trusted node, your own node, or Tor.
• Talk less about amounts. What you say leaks more than any blockchain.

Monero is money, so what you can do with it depends on who accepts it. Acceptance is smaller than for Bitcoin and it changes over time, but the uses are real:

• Shops that list XMRSome online stores and services take Monero at checkout, directly or through a payment processor.
• Pay people directlyFreelancers, sellers and friends can be paid with nothing but an address.
• Donate quietlyMany open-source projects and creators publish a Monero address for donations.
• Send across bordersSame rules, any day, any country, for a small network fee.
• Pay without a card numberA payment needs only the recipient's address. No card details to leak.
• Keep a private balanceNobody can look up your address to see what you hold.

To find places, the Monero project keeps a list of merchant directories, and says plainly that its listings are not endorsements. Treat an unfamiliar seller with care: payments cannot be reversed, so check reviews from independent sources, send exactly the amount the checkout shows, and to exactly the address it shows.

On the other side of the counter? Our guide to accepting Monero payments covers payment links, a till for your shop and a checkout for your website.

Your first-day checklist

Do this once, with a small amount, and you will have a tested wallet before the amounts matter.

1. Open a wallet from a source you trust

   From a bookmark or a link you typed, never from an ad. You can open MonkStash in your browser.

2. Write down the 25 words, and store two copies

   On paper, numbered, offline, in two places.

3. Receive a small test amount

   Share a fresh subaddress and wait for the 10 confirmations.

4. Send a tiny amount onward

   Proves that sending works and teaches you what the fee looks like.

5. Restore from your words on a second device

   If the balance matches, your backup works. Only then move larger amounts, in stages.

That is the whole of it. Six steps, three of them done once, and a checklist that proves each one works. When you are ready, create your Monero wallet and start with step 1. If you get stuck, the FAQ and support page are there to help.