Monero Technical Specs

Live

  • Monero blockchain is live since 18 April 2014

No premine, no instamine, no ICO, no token

  • Monero had no premine or instamine
  • Monero did not sell any token
  • Monero had no presale of any kind

Proof of Work

  • CryptoNight
    • v0 since block height 0
    • v1 since block height 1546000 (forked on 2018-04-06)
    • v2 since block height 1685555 (forked on 2018-10-18)
    • v3 since block height 1788000 (forked on 2019-03-09); “CryptonightR”
  • RandomX
    • v0 since block height 1978433 (forked on 2019-11-30)

Difficulty retarget

  • every block
  • based on the last 720 blocks (24h), excluding 20% of the timestamp outliers

Block time

  • 2 minutes
  • may change in the future as long as emission curve is preserved

Block reward

  • smoothly decreasing and subject to penalties for blocks greater than median size of the last 100 blocks (M100)
  • 0.6 XMR as of June 2023; for the current reward check the coinbase transaction of the latest block

Block size

  • dynamic
  • maximum of two times the median size of the last 100 blocks (2 * M100)
  • ~50KB as of June 2020; check the latest block size

Current blockchain size

  • Pruned node: ~ 57GB as of Jan 2023
  • Complete chain without any pruning: ~138GB as of Jan 2023

Emission curve

Main emission

  • first, the main emission is about to produce ~18.132 million coins by the end of May 2022
  • as of June 2023 the emission is about 3 XMR per 10 minutes
  • see charts and details

Tail emission

  • the tail emission kicked in after main emission is done
  • it will produce 0.6 XMR per 2-minute block
  • this translates to <1% inflation decreasing over time

Max supply

  • ~18.293 million XMR + 0.6 XMR per 2 minutes
  • technically infinite but practically deflationary if accounted for lost coins

Divisibility

  • Monero is divisible up to 12 digits
  • The smallest unit is called piconero and equals 1e-12 XMR, or 0.000000000001 XMR

Sender privacy

  • ring signatures
    • the ring size is 16 (15 decoys)
  • assurance: probabilistic / plausible deniability

Recipient privacy

  • stealth addresses
  • assurance: strong

Amount privacy

  • ring confidential transactions
  • assurance: strong

IP address privacy

For the full node (monerod):

  • dandelion++
  • assurance: won’t protect against ISP/VPN provider, won’t protect against the very first remote node in Dandellion++ protocol
  • for the full protection user must manually wrap monerod with Tor

For the wallet (monero-wallet-gui or monero-wallet-cli):

  • typically wallet runs on the same machine as full node so there is no risk
  • if wallet connects to remote full node, there is no IP protection by default
    • user must manually wrap wallet with Tor or I2P