Best Monero wallets: where to receive your XMR

01What matters when you receive XMR

Every serious Monero wallet sends and receives the same coins over the same network. What separates them is who you have to trust along the way. Four questions, in order of importance:

• Who holds the keys? Only wallets where the seed phrase is generated on your device and never leaves it. A service that keeps your keys on its server is an account, whatever it calls itself.
• Which node does it talk to? A wallet reads the blockchain through a node. Your own node reveals nothing to anyone; a remote node learns your IP address and when you check your wallet — not your balance. Tor, where offered, hides the IP.
• Subaddresses? Each one looks unrelated to the others, so a different one for each payer — or each swap — keeps them from being linked. All the wallets below support them.
• Is it open source and maintained? Old, abandoned wallets break at the next network upgrade. Every wallet here has been updated through several of them.

02Five wallets, compared

No affiliate links, and nobody paid to be listed. Download each wallet from its official website or app store listing only — fake Monero wallets exist to steal seeds.

03On a computer: GUI or Feather

The Monero GUI is maintained by the Monero Project itself. Its “advanced” mode downloads and checks the whole blockchain — a large download that takes a day or more the first time, less with the pruning option — after which your wallet depends on nobody. Its “simple” mode uses a remote node instead and starts in minutes.

Feather is the lightweight alternative: it starts in seconds on a remote node, routes its connections over Tor, and lets you choose exactly which coins you spend (coin control) — useful for keeping funds from different sources apart. It is a favourite of people who move XMR often.

04On a phone: Cake Wallet or Monerujo

Cake Wallet holds Monero next to Bitcoin, Litecoin and other coins, on iOS and Android, and was one of the first mobile Monero wallets. Monerujo is Android-only and Monero-only, and has been around almost as long. Both are open source, both connect to remote nodes by default, and both let you point them to your own node when you have one.

A phone is fine for the amounts you would carry in a physical wallet. For savings, keep the bulk elsewhere — on a hardware wallet, or a desktop wallet on a computer you trust.

05For savings: a hardware wallet

A hardware wallet keeps the private keys on a separate device and signs transactions there, so a compromised computer cannot empty it. Monero works on Ledger (Nano S, Nano S Plus, Nano X) and Trezor (Model T, Safe 3, Safe 5) devices, always through a companion wallet: the GUI, the CLI or Feather for both brands, and Cake Wallet or Monerujo for Ledger.

The device shows the receiving address on its own screen: compare it with the one the computer shows before you give it out. That check is the whole point of the device.

06Receiving a swap payout, step by step

1. Create a new subaddress Label it in the wallet — “swap, September”, for instance. It starts with 8; the main address starts with 4. Both are 95 characters.
2. Paste it into the swap Never retype it, and compare the first and last six characters. From Bitcoin, the smallest swap is 0.0001425 BTC right now.
3. Wait for the lock Incoming XMR is spendable after 10 blocks, about 20 minutes: the wallet shows it as “locked” or “pending” until then. That is normal, not a problem with the payout.

What the network takes: sending your payout on the Monero network costs 0.009 XMR right now. It is already inside every quote on this site — nothing is added on top.

07Questions people ask