Currently if you were to buy Monero in huge quantity, you’ll be flagged and there’s no DEX that offers Monero. What’s the best way to buy Monero now?
You can buy other coins and then swap them for Monero. In fact any transaction you make with nay coin should go through Monero if you want to stay private.
You can use https://trocador.app/
To buy Monero you can use https://localmonero.co
Wait. While Trocador is an option, it’s just a front end of CEXes, not a DEX. You might be still KYC’ed there, so it shouldn’t be the best (first) option. Just a possibly convenient option.
There is no functioning DEX with Monero as of now, once there is I will recommend it for sure. I should have added the advice about only swap what you can lose with centralized services.
The OP would like to do coin-coin right? Then Bisq is a good DEX.
If you’re a taker, just buying Monero, then the rate may be bad (Trocador might be better rate-wise). If you’re a maker, selling BTC for XMR, then the rate may be good—but if you try to sell it too high, obviously no one will take it or you’ll have to wait for a long time, so it’s not good when you’re in hurry. If you sell BTC nicely, just like +0.5%, well that may sell like hot cakes (assuming that there are many people who want to sell XMR for BTC, which is admittedly questionable).
The maker taker model is too cumbersome for me tbh. Don’t have time to sit there and wait for takers, prefer instant swaps. Non-custodial liquidity pools is the best solution IMO, I hope we have Serai soon.
-
Bisq is Non-custodial. It’s listed #1 in kycnot.me too. Your fund is always with you. It’s Pure P2P. Which is better than Trocador but it does have both good sides and bad sides. See 4) and 5) below.
-
If you’re just taking an existing offer, Altcoin Instant, then the trade window is one hour. It’s rather quick and painless, certainly safer than Trocador, except the rate may be better or worse (it depends).
-
If you’re just taking an existing offer, Altcoin, then the trade window is 24 hours. Not suitable if you’re in hurry. But you don’t need to “sit there and wait”. 24 hours means, it’s enough for you to check it twice a day. Otherwise you can go out or sleep or do whatever. (This is when you’re a maker. If you’re a taker, you can take an offer instantly.)
-
Good thing: Since it’s non-custodial, you can freely cancel your offer any time even if you’re a maker; your fund is always with you, there’s no custodian who might freeze it.
-
Bad thing: Since it’s de-centralized pure P2P over onion (Darknet) not controlled by someone in the center, if you’re a maker, you need to run Bisq 24-hours. You can close it and turn off your machine, but then your offer is not visible. It’ll be visible again, if you restart Bisq, though.
A philosophical point to think about: “That’s inconvenient.” “I don’t like to wait.” — That’s a conventional customer-provider point of view. This is pure P2P, peers on an equal footing are helping each other with no central custodians. In a way, you could be a volunteer, who sells XMR to those who want to try it. When other sellers are doing say +5%, you could make with −1% (meaning “Hey, try XMR, I’ll share mine cheaper than the market price"). Of course, this will be often taken very quickly, because it’s a nice offer. Why do that? Well, you might be generous, or perhaps you got XMR when it was less than 100€ so spot −1% is actually selling high for you, or you just want to make it easy for new people to get XMR because of philosophical reasons, with some self sacrifice.
Bisq is one of the largest DEX, if not the largest, where the top 3 currencies are EUR, USD and XMR. The OP asked “Is there any way to swap a coin to xmr?” Not mentioning Bisq is absurd and unhelpful, no matter whether you like it or not.
Then again, obviously Bisq is not something Monero users generally love very much. It’s BTC-centric. I only seldom, if ever, use it myself. Another thing is, a peer-to-peer trade on Bisq is secured trustlessly by 2-of-2 multi-sig by the seller and buyer. While this is cool, it’s something not yet practical with XMR, so frankly I kind of feel a sense of inferiority about that. I hope the XMR version of this platform, Haveno, will become usable soon! Because what happens to Binance could happen to any CEX, including Instant-Swap CEXes or Cake (?) or anything. A pure P2P may be inconvenient but it seems critically important.
-
I second this. The rest of my life is too busy to manage that. More power to those who do. I LOVE that BISQ is out there. It’s great for Monero, but I need something that is as easy as a few clicks to swap. Hoping atomic swaps keep greeting more user friendly with easier UX and process.
Check this directory if you want to deep dive, kycnot is also a good directory with good due diligence.
It’s not a straight forward process based on my experience (im not a highly technical user and not a dev). I haven’t seen any DEX offering to swap tokens to MOnero given that most DEXs are not on Monero chain. And many CEXs are also not offering Monero due to regulatory issue. There are some CEXs you can use such as MEXC and TraderOgre using USDT and BTC as XMR’s pair. I’m not aware that you will be flagged for buying XMR in huge quantity…which platform would flag that if you dont mind me asking.
XMR/BTC is easy on Bisq, a DEX but BTC fees are crazy!
This should give you a lot of starting points. There are a bunch of options that run trustless with atomic swaps between various tokens and no KYC. I haven’t used them, as a disclaimer, as I’ve always bought person to person via cash, but there options on there for atomic swaps from Bitcoin to monero, eth to monero, etc.
Thanks but I can’t seem to load the site
They mistyped the link and forgot a “c”
KYC stands for Know Your Customer
kycnot.me is the correct link
The below link is to their .onion site but it seems to be down. If anyone knows the maintainer, they may want to reach out. http://kycnotmezdiftahfmc34pqbpicxlnx3jbf5p7jypge7gdvduu7i6qjqd.onion/
Yep that’s exactly right. I’ve fixed the link in my original comment. Unfortunately I have no knowledge regarding the onion link.
Maybe I’ll reach out to the maintainer at some point. It’s such a great resource. Accessing on Tor via .onion is even better.
thanks for sharing this! bookmarked!
Atomic xmr BTC exchanges might interest you
Didn’t know such a thing exist
See also: https://monero.town/post/942859 How to sell $300k+ Monero without origin of funds?
This is interesting. Is there a way to bridge the tokens out to other chains too?
Edit: found out you can use exolix to do this
When trying to swap something to XMR (esp. a large amount? or at a small CEX?), it seems that there is always a possibility that the CEX (which may claim you can swap any amount) may not actually have enough XMR.
(They might be offering to sell Monero, when they don’t have enough.)
PS. Historically there are a few warnings: https://metager.de/meta/meta.ger3?eingabe=Exolix Monero
Thank you. I’ll take note of this
It’s been some time since I bought monero for the last time but when I did localmonero was the perfect place for me …easy to use, fast do buy and I just deposited to the guys account and done…