Monero Stablecoin: Does One Actually Exist?

Is Monero a stablecoin?

No. Monero is a privacy-focused cryptocurrency, and its unit XMR has a floating market price set by supply and demand. Nothing in the protocol targets a peg, holds reserves against one, or intervenes to defend a price. So the question “is Monero stable” has a straightforward answer: not in the stablecoin sense. Monero is engineered for on-chain confidentiality and fungibility, not for price stability, and anyone holding XMR carries the full market risk of a volatile asset.

Why there is no stablecoin on Monero itself

This is a protocol-level constraint rather than a gap somebody forgot to fill. Monero has no smart-contract layer and no token standard: the protocol issues XMR and nothing else. On Ethereum or Tron, a dollar token is a contract deployed to a general-purpose virtual machine, which is how USDT and USDC came to exist there. Monero has no equivalent surface to deploy onto, and that is deliberate: a narrow protocol is a small attack surface.

The practical consequence is that anyone wanting a pegged asset with Monero's privacy properties has had to copy the codebase and launch a separate blockchain. Every project so far described as a Monero stablecoin has worked that way, and the distinction matters: a coin on a Monero-derived chain inherits some of Monero's cryptography, but none of its hash rate, network effect or track record.

Haven Protocol and xUSD: the best-known attempt

Haven Protocol is the project most people mean when they ask about a Monero stablecoin. It ran its own blockchain built from Monero's codebase, with XHV as the base coin and a family of private synthetic assets minted against it. The flagship was xUSD, a synthetic dollar created and redeemed through a mint-and-burn mechanism against XHV rather than backed by anything held off-chain.

The facts that follow are all taken from the project's own published announcements on havenprotocol.org. Conversions between Haven assets were suspended in June 2022, after the project's economics working group identified conditions in the supply and the existing economic model that it said could produce a hyper-inflationary event; a community vote subsequently backed keeping the pause. Conversions did not stay halted permanently: the project says the January 2023 release of Haven 3.0, which introduced its VBS tokenomics, allowed conversions to be restarted. On 12 December 2024 the project published a closure announcement. It described a vulnerability, active since August 2023, that permitted unauthorised minting — in the announcement's own words, one that allowed “a potential 1.3 billion illicit XHV to be minted through at least 42 transactions” — and stated that “over 94% of the known supply is now controlled by the attackers”. It also cited chronic lack of funding, with developers working largely without compensation.

One detail from that announcement is worth carrying forward, because it is the crux of this whole subject. The team considered rolling the chain back and concluded it was not workable, in part because the chain's own privacy features made it impossible to identify which wallets held the illicitly minted coins. The property that made xUSD attractive is the same property that made the damage impossible to unwind cleanly.

Why a confidential stablecoin is genuinely hard

A stablecoin is a claim, and a claim is worth what the evidence behind it is worth. There are broadly two ways to evidence one. A fiat-reserve token like USDT or USDC points at assets held off-chain by a company and published in periodic attestation reports, so you trust the issuer and the auditor. A crypto-collateralised token points at collateral on a public ledger that anyone can read — better for verification, because there is no report to trust.

Now add confidentiality. If the ledger hides amounts and balances, the same opacity that protects an individual user also hides the system's books. A holder cannot read the collateral position directly, and neither can anyone else. Haven's closure is the concrete illustration rather than a hypothetical: once supply had been inflated, the privacy design meant nobody could identify the illicit outputs or size the hole precisely enough to unwind it.

So the real design problem is narrower and harder than “make a private dollar”. It is: conceal individual balances and transfers while still making the aggregate collateral position provable to everyone. Projects attack that from different directions — publishing the reserve pool transparently while keeping user transfers confidential, or using cryptographic proofs that assert solvency over hidden amounts. It is also why failures in this category have been economic and accounting failures rather than privacy failures. The privacy generally worked. The books were the problem.

What exists today

Nothing on Monero. The live attempts remain separate chains. Zephyr Protocol runs a blockchain built from Monero's codebase with an over-collateralised stable asset, Zephyr Stable Dollar (ZSD), using a reserve model derived from the Djed design — a live project at the time of writing, but again its own network rather than an asset on Monero.

You will also encounter Monero Dollar (XMRD) high in search results for this query. Its most-cited public update is a Medium post dated 15 October 2023, describing a separate stablecoin blockchain optimised from Monero, which says the beta testing phase was “set to commence shortly” and mainnet was “expected to occur in 2023”. That post remains its most visible public status statement, which is worth weighing before treating the project as a working option.

Outside the Monero lineage: fUSD on Zano

If what you actually want is a dollar-denominated asset whose amounts are concealed at the protocol level, that does exist — on a different privacy chain. Freedom Dollar (fUSD) is a US dollar-pegged asset issued natively on the Zano blockchain as a Confidential Asset, over-collateralised by ZANO held on-chain, and it launched in May 2025. Because it is a confidential asset, transfer amounts and balances are hidden on the ledger by default rather than published.

Being even-handed about it matters more than selling it, so, plainly:

• It is not on Monero and has no connection to the Monero project. Holding XMR gets you nothing here, and the two chains share no security.
• It is not the same trust model as XMR. XMR's guarantees come from Monero's protocol alone. fUSD depends on Zano's protocol plus a collateral mechanism, and that mechanism is a separate source of risk: the collateral is a volatile asset, which is why the system is designed to hold more of it than the fUSD in circulation. Over-collateralisation reduces peg risk; it does not remove it.
• Its market cap is small — far below USDT or USDC — so liquidity, venue support and depth are limited by comparison.
• There is no issuer to redeem from. Units are created against on-chain collateral, so nobody stands behind it at par, and nobody is positioned to freeze a balance either.

That last point deserves to be stated neutrally. Tether and Circle both publicly document that they can freeze balances at specific addresses, and both have done so, generally in response to law-enforcement requests; it is written into their terms and visible on-chain. That is a stated property of those tokens rather than a hidden flaw, and it is part of the same machinery that makes them redeemable at par. The genuine choice is between a redeemable claim on an identifiable issuer and collateral you can verify yourself, and reasonable people land on either side of it. The confidential versus transparent stablecoin comparison sets the two models side by side.

For how fUSD is backed, its on-chain asset ID and which other assets share the FUSD ticker, see the Freedom Dollar (fUSD) reference page. On ZanoX, USDT and USDC on Ethereum, USDT on Tron and ZANO itself move into and out of fUSD in both directions. Every route is signed from a wallet you control, so coins sitting in a centralized exchange account have to be withdrawn to your own wallet first. Where a conversion crosses chains it is carried by a third-party swap provider, which takes temporary control of the funds in transit; the ZANO ⇄ fUSD leg is the exception, because it settles atomically inside your own Zano wallet.

Frequently asked questions