Monero developers are preparing a major privacy upgrade known as FCMP++, which would replace the ring signatures currently used to hide every spend. The change would let a transaction prove that it spends one of more than 150 million spendable outputs on the chain, a massive expansion from the current anonymity set of 16 ring members. However, there is no official fork date, and the only public timeline is a non-binding working draft from a Monero developer.
The draft plan pencilled in a first fork-enabled release for October 14 to 21, 2026, a fully featured release with hardware wallet and multisig support in early December, and activation around the first week of March 2027. As of October 23, getmonero.org had not announced a fork-enabled release. Monero’s blog said in May 2026 that a fork date was not set, and dates in the draft have moved before and can move again.
Monero currently hides payments through three tools: ring signatures hide the sender, stealth addresses hide the receiver, and Ring Confidential Transactions hide the amount. Early academic research found weaknesses, including a 2017 study that identified the real output being spent in 87% of cases and a 2018 paper showing that the newest ring member was usually the real one. Most of those problems were fixed by protocol changes such as a minimum ring size and better decoy selection, but repeated payments between the same parties remain a statistical privacy risk.
With FCMP++, existing standard addresses and subaddresses would keep working, but wallets would need a one-time chain re-scan. Transactions would become larger, new transactions would no longer support custom unlock times, and a new addressing protocol called Carrot would ship with the upgrade. Carrot is designed to protect against the Janus address-linking attack and the burning bug.
Separately, an October 2026 guide on converting Bitcoin to Monero highlights no-KYC routes as the main way to obtain XMR after several large exchanges delisted the coin. The guide ranks GhostSwap as the top instant swap service, followed by HiddenSwap and SwapRocket, and also covers peer-to-peer options such as Bisq 1 and atomic swap applications like eigenwallet and BasicSwap. Standard BTC to XMR swaps through those services typically take 20 to 60 minutes after Bitcoin confirmations.
