Monero without KYC or an account: hold BTC, atomic-swap it

Why "no KYC" usually has an asterisk

Search for a way to buy Monero without identity checks and you will find two kinds of pages: card-purchase funnels and lists of instant swap services. Both come with conditions that are easy to miss. A card purchase runs through a payment processor, and the processor knows who you are whatever the crypto site says. An instant swap service takes your bitcoin into its own wallet and sends Monero back later; while it holds the funds, its terms decide whether the trade goes through, and such terms commonly allow pausing a trade to ask for documents. "No account" there means "no signup form"; it does not mean nobody can stop the trade.

The route that removes the intermediary altogether is to already hold bitcoin and exchange it directly. That is what an atomic swap does, and it is what this site runs: you send BTC from your own Bitcoin browser wallet, you receive XMR at the Monero address you give, and at no point does anyone hold both sides.

Why an atomic swap cannot KYC you

KYC works when a service can refuse to give your money back. It needs a balance it controls and an account it can suspend. An atomic swap has neither. Your BTC goes into a 2-of-2 lock on the Bitcoin chain that only releases to the maker once the maker's XMR is locked on the Monero chain for you; the two locks are tied to the same secret, so either both transfers complete or the Bitcoin lock is refunded to you after a timeout. There is no deposit to freeze pending a document upload, and no account anywhere to suspend.

This is not a policy we could change in a bad week; it is how the protocol is built. You do not create a login, give an email or upload anything. The same maker is available from the eigenwallet desktop app, so the website is a convenience, not a gatekeeper: if it went away, you could add our rendezvous node in the app and swap the same way. What the site adds is a taker running on our server plus a connection to a Bitcoin browser wallet, currently Unisat, so the flow works from a browser without installing anything.

What is public and what is not

A swap involves two chains with very different properties. On the Bitcoin side, everything is public and permanent. The transaction from your wallet into the swap lock is visible to anyone, as is the transaction that later spends it, and once the lock is spent its script is revealed, so the transaction can be recognised as a swap. We do not claim to hide that, and no BTC-to-XMR swap can: bitcoin is transparent by design. If the address you swap from is already linked to your identity, that link exists before and after the swap.

On the Monero side, the lock and the payout to your address are ordinary Monero transactions: amounts and receiving addresses are not readable on the public chain, and the sender is hidden among decoys. Nobody watching the Monero network learns which output is yours or how much it was worth.

On our side, the maker necessarily learns the swap amount, your Bitcoin lock transaction and the Monero address it pays to, because it has to send there. Your browser wallet extension also talks to its provider's servers to read balances, which is outside our control. The privacy page lists exactly what we keep, including the optional analytics cookie you can decline. There is no name, email or identity for any of this to attach to. Use a fresh Monero subaddress for the payout if you want the swap unlinked from anything else you receive.

Limits and price

The swap page shows the live minimum and maximum next to the quote. At the time of writing (23/09/2026) they run from about 0.00187 BTC to a maximum set by the XMR the maker currently holds, roughly 0.28 BTC. Both numbers move, so read them from the page rather than from this text.

The minimum exists because an atomic swap needs at least two on-chain Bitcoin transactions, each paying miner fees; below a certain size the fees would eat the trade. The maximum is the maker's available Monero inventory: the XMR you receive is locked on-chain before the maker can be paid, so it has to exist first. The maximum applies per swap.

The quote is a commission over the Kraken XMR/BTC rate, today around 1.2 to 1.4 %, plus Bitcoin network fees, with no developer tip; the fees page details it. A typical swap completes in 30 to 60 minutes, most of it waiting for one Bitcoin confirmation and ten Monero confirmations.

Using Tor

Nothing here requires Tor, but the site is built for it. The same swap page is served on our onion mirror, btcxmrj6vte7yjuefnju3nowry5o76po6mtsnnk5jkoj3jmyp2mt2oqd.onion, and the maker itself listens on an onion address for desktop-app users. Over Tor, the connection to our server does not carry your IP address. The Tor page explains how to reach the mirror and what the wallet extension needs inside Tor Browser.

The honest summary: no account, no email, no identity check, no custodian; your BTC transaction is public like every BTC transaction, your XMR is private like every XMR transaction. Read how the atomic swap works (/how) for the mechanism step by step, then start on the swap page (/).