How to buy Monero anonymously in 2026
Monero is the coin most Tor shops want. Buying it without handing over your ID takes one more step than buying Bitcoin on Coinbase, but the step is not hard once you know which service to pick.
The short version
Buy Bitcoin however you already do. Send it to Cake Wallet or the desktop Monero GUI and swap it for Monero inside the wallet using their built-in exchange integrations. No account, no ID, funds land in your wallet under your keys. This is what most people should do the first few times.
If you want to buy Monero directly for cash or a bank transfer without touching Bitcoin first, use a Lightning peer-to-peer market: RoboSats or Kraken over Lightning if you have an account there. Or a classic P2P market like Haveno or LocalMonero replacements (LocalMonero itself shut down in 2024). More work but less trail.
The Cake Wallet route, step by step
Install Cake Wallet on your phone or the Monero GUI on your desktop. Create a new wallet. Write down the 25 word seed on paper. Do not screenshot it. Do not save it in a password manager that syncs to the cloud.
Open the exchange tab inside the wallet. Pick a provider from the list, usually ChangeNow, SimpleSwap, Trocador or SideShift. Enter the amount of Monero you want. The provider gives you a Bitcoin address to send to. Send from wherever you have Bitcoin, wait for the confirmations, Monero shows up in your wallet.
The exchange provider sees the incoming Bitcoin address and the outgoing Monero address. What they do not see is your identity, and they do not ask. If you want to break that link too, run the Bitcoin through a coinjoin round first, or better, buy Bitcoin from a P2P source in the first place.
RoboSats over Lightning
RoboSats is a peer to peer market that runs on the Bitcoin Lightning network with almost no metadata. You open it in Tor Browser at robosats.org or its onion, generate a random robot avatar as your identity, and pick an offer. Some offers are for cash by mail, others for bank transfer, others for gift cards. Not every offer supports Monero directly but any Bitcoin you get can be swapped inside a wallet after.
Fees are around 0.2 percent plus network. Trades take from ten minutes to an hour depending on the payment method.
Haveno and the P2P Monero markets
Haveno is a peer to peer Monero market built on the Bisq codebase. You run the Haveno client on your machine, connect to a Haveno network, and post or take offers denominated in your currency. Payment methods include bank transfer, cash by mail, revolut, wise, gift cards. The whole trade sits inside a 2 of 2 Monero multisig so neither side can run with the money.
Haveno is more work to set up than Cake Wallet but it is the closest thing to buying Monero for fiat directly without a KYC counterparty.
What to avoid
Big centralized exchanges that delist Monero regularly, then require you to withdraw fast. Kraken and a few others still list it as of writing, but if you go this route you have handed over your ID for the buy and only get privacy on the send-out side.
Random Telegram OTC dealers you found in a chat. Same for the ones who reply in market forum threads offering good rates for gift cards. They exist, some are real, most are scams. Not worth the risk for anything above small change.
How much Monero to buy
Enough for the order plus a small buffer for the network fee. Do not park your savings in Monero unless you actually want the price exposure. The price does swing.
After the buy
Keep the coins in a wallet where you hold the keys (Cake Wallet, Monero GUI, Feather). Do not leave them on any exchange. When you send to a market deposit address, the market credits you and the transaction is invisible to anyone watching the chain. That is the whole point of using Monero in the first place.