How ring signatures hide the spender
When you spend a Monero output, it's mixed with decoys pulled from earlier transactions to form a ring. The signature proves that one of them is yours β without revealing which. To anyone watching the chain, every member of the ring is an equally plausible spender. Try to break it below.
You're watching the blockchain. One of these outputs is the real spend β the rest are decoys. Can you tell which? Click your guess.
Turn on JavaScript to step through the interactive ring. The idea: your one real output is hidden among decoys, and every member of the ring looks equally spendable on-chain.
No guesses yet β the whole point is that you can't do better than luck.
Illustrative values. Real Monero currently uses a ring size of 16 and picks decoys with a gamma distribution that mimics real spending patterns, so the true output blends in. A bigger ring means a larger anonymity set β and lower odds anyone guesses right.
Why this matters
- Plausible deniability by default. Every output you didn't spend still looks exactly as spendable as the one you did.
- It stacks with stealth addresses. Stealth addresses hide who receives; ring signatures hide who sends β see the receiving side β.
- No opt-in, no mixing service. Unlike coin-mixing on transparent chains, this happens automatically on every Monero transaction.