Every transaction on Monero costs a fee, paid in XMR, which stops the network being flooded with free transactions.

Where that fee goes is worth stating precisely, because it is the cleanest answer in this assessment. All of it goes to the miners who process transactions. Not most, all. There is no protocol cut, no treasury, no fee routed anywhere else. The data source measuring Monero's economics records its protocol revenue as a real, measured zero across every day of its record, and the reason is structural rather than a gap in the data: revenue in that measurement means coins destroyed, and Monero destroys none.

Beyond paying fees, XMR is a bearer asset. It is held, sent and received, privately. That is all it does, and it is all it was built to do.

Over the trailing year, people paid $1,394,028 in fees to use Monero. That figure is measured with complete daily data covering every day of the year.

Against Monero's size, it is very small. A year of fees comes to 0.0216% of the total value of all XMR in existence, roughly one part in five thousand. An app store typically takes fifteen to thirty percent of what happens on it. Monero's protocol take is not small, it is zero, and the 0.0216% is what users pay miners directly.

Monthly fees have roughly doubled across the record, from about $86,000 in mid-2025 to a peak of $202,943 in January 2026, settling since into a range around $80,000 to $110,000 a month. The direction is up, not down.

One limit matters more here than on any other page. The fee record only goes back to May 2025, covering 463 days against a network that launched in 2014. Nothing on this page describes Monero's fees before that date, and no figure here is an all-time or lifetime total. The measurement source publishes a number labelled all-time; it is only the sum of these same 463 days, mislabelled by roughly eleven years, and it appears nowhere in this assessment.

Monero's market value, the price of every XMR in existence multiplied together, is $6,456,802,277. Divide that by the trailing year's fees and Monero trades at roughly 4,632 times its fee income.

For comparison, a wireless network project this framework uses as its example of an extreme, speculative valuation traded at roughly 87,000 times its own fees. Monero's multiple is well inside that, and smaller than several projects assessed here.

Two things bound what this number can mean, and both should be stated. The two figures are measured three months apart, so the comparison is closer to an estimate than a clean division. And more fundamentally: the activity that generates those fees is invisible. Every transaction on Monero is private, so whatever economic value moves across the network cannot appear in any measurement anywhere. That is a design property, not a data gap, and it means this ratio compares a public number against a deliberately hidden one. It does not reduce the multiple; it limits what the multiple describes.

Monero has no supply cap. About 18.76 million XMR exist today, and new coins will continue to be created indefinitely at a small fixed rate, a design called tail emission.

That is a real difference from most of the projects assessed here, and it is worth being clear about which kind of difference it is. Several projects publish a figure that looks like a maximum supply and turns out to be a projection rather than a limit. Monero publishes no such figure at all, because none exists. The measurement source correctly records its maximum supply as absent.

The reasoning behind tail emission is that miners must be paid something forever. On a network with a hard cap, mining rewards eventually stop and the network depends entirely on transaction fees to stay secure. Monero's design chooses a small permanent inflation over that outcome.

There is no unissued allocation waiting to arrive, no vesting schedule, and no insider tranche. There was no premine and no founder allocation to begin with, which is why the test for insider behaviour in this assessment found nothing to report.

Both of the two failing tests in this assessment say the same thing in different words: there is no application ecosystem on Monero. It does not rank among the top networks by revenue, and third parties do not build products on top of it.

Both are factually correct, and the reason is structural. Monero has no smart contracts, so it cannot host that kind of application. Third parties integrate it as an asset or build tools around it; they do not build protocols on it, because there is nothing to build them with.

The honest question is whether that is a failure. Monero was not built to host a financial ecosystem. It was built so that a payment can be made privately, and it does that. Two failing tests out of thirty-four applied, both saying one thing, and a reader who holds that a privacy payment chain is not obliged to have a DeFi ecosystem removes the entire case against it.

What that leaves is a project this framework could find nothing else wrong with.

This assessment tests projects against seventy-three questions. For Monero, thirty-nine of them, 53%, could not be applied at all.

The reason is not that Monero is thin. It is that this framework contains no question about privacy and no question about zero-knowledge cryptography. It was built to assess general-purpose networks, so it asks about lending markets, stablecoins, exchange architecture, application ecosystems and how value flows between a platform and the products on it. Monero has none of those, so those questions are category mismatches rather than failures.

Monero is a harder case for this framework than any project assessed here, including Zcash. Zcash at least had a transparent portion, an outside estimate of value held, and a real supply cap, three things the framework could measure. Monero has none of them: no transparent side, no value-locked figure, no emissions schedule, no supply cap, and fee income as the only usage measure that exists at all.

One question makes the gap concrete. An entire block of six questions about holder behaviour, exchange flows and wallet accumulation could not be scored, and on Monero they never could be by anyone. Every one of them requires reading balances off a public ledger. Monero has no public ledger. On every other project those questions go unanswered because the data was not gathered; here the data cannot exist.

In August 2025 a group called Qubic gained majority control of Monero's mining power for roughly six hours. With that control it reorganised the recent chain history, discarding about sixty blocks that had already been mined.

No funds were stolen. No transaction was reversed to steal from anyone, no double-spend succeeded, and the network resolved on its own without any coordinated intervention.

What ended it is the interesting part. Exchanges began refusing coins that came from Qubic's mining, which meant the coins the attack produced were becoming worthless. The attack undermined the value of exactly what it was mining, and it stopped being worth continuing. That is the economic defence a proof-of-work network is supposed to have, working as designed, and it worked without anyone needing authority to switch anything off.

It remains a real demonstration that Monero's mining power can be concentrated. It is also the only such event in the network's twelve-year history.

Monero has been delisted by several major exchanges under regulatory pressure, and the pattern is worth stating accurately because it is often reported too simply.

Binance removed Monero globally in February 2024, citing its listing standards. Kraken removed it in the European Economic Area in October 2024, driven by European regulation, but Kraken continues to list Monero in the United States and other regions. It is not a global delisting, and describing it as one would be wrong.

The direction is real: privacy coins face regulatory pressure that other assets do not, and that has narrowed where XMR can be bought and sold on regulated venues. Whether that pressure continues, spreads or reverses is not something this assessment can predict.

One thing follows from all this that is worth naming, because it looks like an absence and is not. The dataset this assessment uses to check how much of a coin sits on exchanges shows nothing at all for Monero. That is not evidence exchanges do not hold XMR, they demonstrably do, or they could not delist it. It is because that dataset works by observing public blockchain balances, and Monero has none to observe.