# Paying with Monero — what privacy you get, and what you don't Source: https://proxuno.com/blog/monero-payments-and-privacy Updated: 2026-10-03 > An archived guide to Monero privacy. XMR is not offered by the current checkout; see the active currencies and manual payment instructions before sending. > **Current payment note — 3 October 2026.** This archived article describes an earlier configuration. Monero is not offered for new top-ups. Do not send XMR; use the [active currencies and manual payment instructions](/crypto-proxies) shown on your invoice. From today, Monero (XMR) is accepted at checkout alongside Bitcoin, Ether and USDT. It was one of the most requested additions from customers who care about payment privacy. This article explains what Monero actually changes compared with other currencies, and what it does not. ## Transparent ledgers: what Bitcoin reveals On Bitcoin and Ethereum, every transaction is public forever: the sending addresses, the receiving addresses and the amounts. Addresses are pseudonymous, not anonymous. Once any address is linked to an identity — through an exchange withdrawal, a merchant receipt, a public donation address — chain analysis can often follow funds forward and backward through many hops. For a customer paying a proxy invoice, that means: - Anyone who knows your address can see you paid a proxy provider, how much, and when. - Anyone who knows our receiving address can see the payment, though it cannot directly identify you. - If you pay from an exchange account, the exchange knows both your identity and the destination. None of this is secret to the people who design these systems — transparency is the point of a public ledger — but it surprises many users. ## How Monero differs Monero was designed so that the ledger does not reveal who paid whom or how much. It combines three mechanisms: ### Ring signatures Every input in a transaction is signed together with decoy outputs taken from the blockchain — ten at the time of writing, rising to fifteen with the network upgrade scheduled for August 2022. An observer can verify that one of the outputs in the ring was spent, but not which one. ### Stealth addresses The address you publish is never written on the chain. For each payment, the sender derives a one-time destination address. Two payments to the same recipient cannot be linked by looking at the ledger. ### RingCT Amounts are hidden using Pedersen commitments with range proofs (Bulletproofs). The network can verify that no money is created out of thin air without seeing the values. Together, these mean that a Monero payment to our invoice address does not appear on any public ledger as a link between your wallet and us. ## What Monero does not protect Privacy is a chain of links, and Monero only secures the on-chain one. - **Where the XMR came from.** If you buy XMR on an exchange that knows your identity and withdraw it straight to our invoice, the exchange's records still link you to the withdrawal amount and time. Withdrawing to your own wallet first, and paying from there, breaks that direct link. - **Network-level metadata.** A remote node you connect to sees your IP address and the timing of your transaction broadcast. Running your own node, or connecting through Tor, avoids this. - **The account itself.** We still need an email address to deliver credentials and send expiry notices. Use one you are comfortable associating with the account. - **Amounts and timing.** Invoices have a specific amount and a 30-minute window. Someone who already knows you bought a specific product at a specific time could correlate that with your own wallet records. That is a limitation of any invoice, not of Monero. We are not in the business of making anyone untraceable, and Monero is not a licence to misuse the network — our acceptable use policy applies the same way whatever the payment method. What Monero offers is the ordinary expectation that your purchases are not published to the world. ## Paying an invoice in XMR The process is the same as for other currencies, with two details worth knowing. (Since v5.5.0, invoices are used to top up your balance rather than to pay a single order; the steps below are unchanged.) 1. Choose **XMR** on the invoice page. We lock the price for 30 minutes and display the exact XMR amount and a one-time subaddress. 2. Send the exact amount from your wallet. Most wallets accept the payment URI encoded in the QR code, which fills in the amount for you. 3. Wait for confirmations. Monero blocks are produced roughly every two minutes, and Monero outputs are spendable only after **10 blocks**, about 20 minutes. Delivery happens automatically once the payment is confirmed. **Fees.** Monero fees depend on transaction size and the priority you select; at normal priority they are negligible next to the invoice amount. You do not need to add the fee to the invoice amount — the wallet adds it on top. **Underpayment.** If you send slightly less than the invoice — for example because you subtracted a fee — you can send the difference within the same 30-minute window. Overpayments are credited to your account. ## Why we accept it Supporting a privacy coin has a cost for us: our accounting needs more care, and some payment processors refuse to touch it. We accept it because the customers asking for it are, in our experience, mostly ordinary businesses and professionals who do not want their supplier relationships visible on a public ledger — the same reason companies do not publish their bank statements. If you have questions about a specific payment, the billing desk can help with the order reference. We never ask for wallet seeds, view keys or private keys, and nobody from our team ever will.