How Does Monero Improve Privacy?

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How Does Monero Improve Privacy?


Monero alleviates privacy concerns using the concepts of ring signatures and stealth addresses.

Ring signatures enable a sending participant to conceal his identity from other participants in a group. Ring signatures are anonymous digital signatures from one member of the group, but they don’t reveal which member signed the transaction.

To generate a ring signature, the monero platform uses a combination of a sender’s account keys and clubs it with public keys on the blockchain, which makes it unique as well as private. This enables the ability to hide the identity of the sender, as it is computationally impossible to ascertain which of the group members' keys was used to produce the complex signature.

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Stealth addresses add additional privacy, as these randomly generated addresses for one-time use are created for each transaction on behalf of the recipient. The use of these stealth addresses enables concealing the actual destination address of a transaction, and it hides the identity of the receiving participant.

Additionally, Ring Confidential Transactions, or RingCT, enables hiding the transaction amount. After achieving success in hiding the identities of senders and receivers, the RingCT functionality was introduced in January 2017, and is made mandatory for all transactions executed on the monero network.