Why Monero
On Bitcoin, anyone can follow a payment from your wallet to ours and onward. Monero hides all three things: ring signatures (ring size 16) obscure which output was spent, stealth addresses hide the recipient, and RingCT hides the amount. The blockchain records that a transaction happened — not who paid whom, or how much.
Choose a wallet
- Monero GUI or CLI — the official wallets, at their best with your own node.
- Feather Wallet — a lightweight desktop wallet.
- Cake Wallet — on mobile.
Whichever you choose, write down the 25-word seed and keep it offline. Running your own node also means no third party sees your IP address when you send, or chooses the decoys your wallet mixes in.
Pay the invoice
- At checkout, choose Monero. The invoice shows a subaddress unique to this invoice, the exact XMR amount and a QR code; the rate is locked for 30 minutes.
- In your wallet, paste the subaddress and the exact amount — or scan the QR code — and send.
- After one confirmation, about two minutes, the invoice is marked paid and provisioning starts.
Mind the 10-block lock
Monero you receive can only be spent after 10 blocks, about 20 minutes. If you have just bought or received XMR, your wallet shows it as locked: wait until it unlocks before opening the invoice, so the rate lock does not expire while you wait.
Proving a payment
If a payment ever needs checking, Monero lets you prove it without revealing anything else about your wallet. Export the transaction key — get_tx_key in the CLI, the “Prove/check” page in the GUI — and send it with the transaction ID. Anyone holding both can confirm that the transaction paid that amount to our address, and nothing more.