OnionSwap
How to swap ETH to Monero without KYC
Ethereum is the most transparent major chain there is. Every transaction, every contract interaction, every token balance sits in a public ledger that a growing industry exists to read, and because so much activity clusters around a handful of identified addresses, the graph is unusually easy to walk. Swapping ETH into Monero is how you step off that ledger. This guide covers the mechanics, the gas and timing that are specific to Ethereum, and the one habit that decides whether the swap actually separates you from your history.
Why leave Ethereum
Because on Ethereum, privacy is the exception rather than the default. A single address often accumulates years of activity — swaps, approvals, NFT mints, airdrops — and each of those is a public data point that analytics firms stitch into a profile. Reusing one address, which the ecosystem quietly encourages, means everything you have ever done is linkable to everything else. Monero inverts this: sender, receiver and amount are hidden by default on every transaction, so there is no profile to accumulate. If you want to hold value without it being readable, moving into Monero is the cleanest way to do it.
What a swap does not do is erase the Ethereum history behind your deposit. That stays where it is. The privacy is forward-looking — everything from the Monero payout onward is opaque; everything before the deposit is unchanged.
Step 1: prepare a Monero address
Open a Monero wallet you control and copy a receiving address. Unlike swapping into Bitcoin, the choice of Monero address does not affect your privacy — Monero addresses are not linkable on-chain, so reusing your primary address is fine. The privacy work on this route is all on the Ethereum side. If you do not have a wallet, the official Monero GUI or a reputable mobile wallet takes seconds.
Step 2: create the order
On the exchange form, pick ETH as the asset you send and XMR as the asset you receive, enter an amount, and paste your Monero address as the payout address. The quote and a single-use deposit address appear on the next page. The cost is a flat 0.4% service fee plus the Ethereum network fee, both already reflected in the number you are quoted — the figure shown is what lands.
The form also prints the minimum and maximum for the pair. The ceiling follows our XMR reserve, which refreshes every fifteen minutes on the home page.
Step 3: mind the gas
This is the one Ethereum-specific wrinkle. Gas is the fee paid to include your transaction in a block, and it swings with network demand — cheap when the chain is quiet, expensive during a busy period. For a small swap, gas can be a visible share of the amount, so it is worth glancing at current fees before you commit. There is nothing to do differently in the swap itself; just size the trade so the gas is not eating the value, and if fees are spiking, waiting an hour often halves them.
Send the exact amount you were quoted to the single-use deposit address. Under- and overpayments are still processed but at the rate current when the deposit is seen, and an amount below the minimum has to be refunded.
Step 4: wait for the payout
Ethereum settles quickly — roughly thirty seconds of block time to confirm — after which the Monero payout is broadcast. Expect the whole thing to take a couple of minutes in normal conditions, faster than the ten-confirmation wait in the other direction. The order page moves through awaiting deposit, confirming, sending and complete, and you can reopen it any time from the track page with your order ID. Save that ID before closing the tab — with no accounts, it is the only handle to the order.
Close the gap on the sending side
The swap breaks the on-chain link cleanly, but the funding matters. If the ETH you deposit is a direct withdrawal from a verified exchange, that exchange sees a withdrawal immediately followed by a deposit to a known swap address — which flags the behaviour on your account even though it does not touch your Monero. If avoiding that flag matters, let the ETH rest at an address you control first, or swap at a different time than you withdrew. Timing correlation is the only part of this an observer on the Ethereum side can actually see.
Does the received Monero carry any Ethereum history?
No. The Monero you receive comes from our own reserves, not from your ETH deposit — the two transactions are on different chains, there is no path between them, and Monero is opaque regardless. The address-clustering and taint concepts that dominate Ethereum analysis simply have nothing to attach to on the Monero side.
Other pairs
The same flow works for any pair we support — BTC, XMR, ETH, LTC, DASH, and the ERC-20 stablecoins USDT, USDC and DAI, in any combination. ETH to a stablecoin is the common variant when the goal is to sit still in dollars rather than hold Monero; ETH to XMR is the one to reach for when the goal is privacy. If you are new to acquiring XMR at all, the anonymous-buying guide covers the wider picture.