OnionSwap
How to swap USDT to Monero without KYC
Moving from Tether to Monero is a different kind of swap than the ones between two coins you already control on-chain. A stablecoin is the most surveilled asset in crypto: every USDT balance sits in a transparent ledger, the issuer can freeze individual addresses, and the largest holders of it are exchanges that know exactly who you are. Converting into Monero is where that transparency stops — but only if you close the gap on the sending side first.
This guide covers which network to send from, the fees and timing, and the one habit that decides whether the swap actually buys you anything.
Why leave USDT at all
Two reasons people usually reach this page. The first is privacy: a stablecoin balance is a permanent, public record tied to whatever address holds it, and if that address ever touched a verified account the link is made. The second is custody risk — Tether can and does freeze addresses at the issuer level, and a frozen balance is not something a swap, a wallet or a support ticket can undo. Monero has neither property. There is no issuer to freeze it and no public balance to trace.
What a swap does not do is rewrite the past. The USDT history behind your deposit stays exactly where it is. The value moving into Monero is private from the payout forward; everything before the deposit is unchanged.
Step 1: know which USDT you are holding
Tether exists on several chains, and they are not interchangeable at the address level. The most common are ERC-20 (Ethereum) and TRC-20 (Tron). The deposit address you are given is for one specific network, and sending on the wrong one is the single most common way people lose a stablecoin deposit — the funds land on a chain the order is not watching and need a manual ticket to recover, if they can be recovered at all.
Before you do anything else, open your wallet and confirm the network your USDT sits on. On the exchange form the sending asset makes the network explicit; match it to what you actually hold, not to what is cheapest to send.
Step 2: prepare a Monero address
Open a Monero wallet you control and copy a receiving address. Unlike the reverse direction into Bitcoin, the choice of Monero address barely matters for privacy — Monero addresses are not linkable on-chain, so reusing your primary address leaks nothing. A fresh subaddress is still tidy for your own bookkeeping, but it is not a privacy requirement here. The privacy work on this route happens on the USDT side, not the XMR side.
If you do not have a wallet yet, the official Monero GUI or a reputable mobile wallet will generate one in seconds; the swap does not care which, only that you hold the keys.
Step 3: create the order
On the exchange form, pick USDT 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 network fee of the sending chain, both already reflected in the number you are quoted — the figure shown is what lands. ERC-20 gas can be meaningful when Ethereum is busy, which is worth checking before you commit a small amount. 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 4: fund the deposit and wait
Send the quoted amount of USDT to the deposit address shown, on the network you confirmed in step one. A few things worth knowing:
The address is single-use. Do not save it for a later swap — reusing it ties the two orders together, and funds sent to an expired order need a manual ticket to recover.
Send the amount you were quoted. Under- and overpayments are still processed, but at the rate current when the deposit is seen rather than the one you were shown; an amount below the minimum has to be refunded.
Ethereum settles a deposit in roughly thirty seconds of block time, so once your USDT transaction confirms the Monero payout follows quickly — expect a couple of minutes end to end in normal conditions. 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
Here is the part people miss. If the USDT you deposit comes straight from a verified exchange withdrawal, the swap is still worth doing, but you have handed that exchange a clear signal: a withdrawal immediately followed by a deposit to a known swap-service address. That does not deanonymise your Monero, which stays opaque — but it does flag the behaviour on the account you withdrew from.
If avoiding that flag matters, put a step between the withdrawal and the swap: let the USDT sit at an intermediate address you control, or withdraw at a different time than you swap. The goal is to break the tight timing correlation, because that correlation is the only part of this an observer on the USDT side can actually see.
Is the Monero I receive "clean"?
The Monero you receive comes from our own reserves, not from your USDT deposit — there is no on-chain path linking the two, and Monero is opaque regardless. The concept of taint that applies to Bitcoin does not translate to Monero at all, because there is no public history for an analyst to score. Once the payout lands, what you do with it afterward is your own ledger, and it is not a public one.
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. USDC and DAI to Monero behave identically to this guide; only the token contract differs. If you are going the other way and want to sit still in something stable rather than hold a volatile asset, the XMR-out guide covers the mirror image.