Search this chain for yourself.
You won’t be there.
A no-logs VPN paid for with a traceable card isn’t really anonymous — it just moves the record from one company to another. LunoVPN removes your identity from the account. Monero removes it from the payment. Type anything below and see what a Monero explorer can tell anyone about you.
Privacy is a chain. Find out where yours breaks.
Anonymity isn’t a feature you buy, it’s a chain of four links — who you are at signup, how you pay, what gets logged, and what your IP leaves behind. A single weak link and the whole thing gives way, because an investigator only has to succeed once. Flip any switch below and watch it snap.
This is the whole argument on one screen: a no-logs policy and an anonymous payment method are not competing features, they are two links in the same chain. LunoVPN supplies the first, third and fourth. Monero supplies the second.
Why Monero matters
Most people meet cryptocurrency through Bitcoin and reasonably assume it is private. It is not. Bitcoin is a public ledger: every address, every balance and every transfer that has ever happened is permanently visible to anyone who cares to look, forever. What it offers is pseudonymity — your name is replaced by an address — and pseudonymity is a fragile thing. The moment one address is connected to you, whether by an exchange that verified your ID, a merchant you paid, or a screenshot you posted years ago, your entire financial history can be reconstructed backwards and forwards from that single point.
Payment data is the most revealing data there is
We tend to think of browsing history as the sensitive thing and payment history as boring admin. It is the other way round. Your transactions record the pharmacy and which one, the clinic and how often, the lawyer, the union dues, the political donation, the dating subscription, the place of worship, the bar near a particular flat every Thursday. Browsing history says what you were curious about; payment history says what you actually did, with timestamps and locations attached, in a record you never see and cannot edit.
That is why payment data is bought and sold so aggressively, and why it keeps turning up in breaches. It is also why a privacy tool bought with a traceable payment is a slightly odd object: the product exists to stop a record being created, and the purchase creates one.
What Monero actually changes
Monero was designed from the start on the assumption that privacy which is optional is privacy that fails. On networks where confidentiality is a feature you switch on, the small group of people who use it stands out, and the act of hiding becomes its own signal. On Monero, concealment is mandatory and automatic for every single transaction, so there is no revealing choice to make and no unusual crowd to stand out from.
Three properties do the work, and they cover the three things an observer needs. The receiver is protected by stealth addresses, meaning the address that appears on-chain is created for that payment alone and cannot be searched for or linked to a merchant. The sender is protected by ring signatures, which prove a valid spend occurred without revealing which of several possible inputs actually moved. The value is protected by RingCT, which encrypts amounts while still letting the network verify that the arithmetic balances. Take away sender, receiver and amount and there is very little left for an analyst to work with.
Fungibility: the quiet argument
There is a second reason privacy advocates care about Monero, and it has nothing to do with hiding. Money is supposed to be fungible — one unit interchangeable with any other, exactly as one ten-pound note is as good as the next. On a transparent chain, coins carry their history with them, which means they can be scored, flagged and refused because of where they have been, possibly long before you owned them. A currency where every unit is equal is a more honest form of cash, and concealed histories are what make that possible.
Privacy is not the same as secrecy
The objection that arrives at this point is always some version of “why would you need that unless you were up to something?” The answer is that we already live this way everywhere else. You have curtains without being a criminal. You seal envelopes without hiding anything from the postman. Salaries are not printed on office noticeboards. Privacy is simply the ability to choose who knows what about you, and it is the default setting in almost every part of life except the digital one, where the default quietly became the opposite.
Become the chain analyst
Reading about untraceability is one thing. Here is a payment for a VPN subscription and five techniques that blockchain analysis firms genuinely use. Switch the chain, run them, and see which one gives you a name.
A simplified teaching simulation, not a real explorer or a real investigation. The techniques shown are genuine categories of blockchain analysis; the data is invented. Card, PayPal and app-store payments remain perfectly good options and we accept all of them — LunoVPN never stores your identity regardless of how you pay.
Monero vs Bitcoin vs a credit card
All three will buy you a subscription. They differ enormously in what they leave behind.
| What’s revealed | Credit card | Bitcoin | Monero |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your legal name | Yes — to bank, network and processor | Usually, via the exchange that sold you the coins | No |
| The amount paid | Yes, and stored for years | Yes — published permanently | Encrypted on-chain |
| Your balance | Known to your bank | Yes — anyone can read it | Not published |
| Your transaction history | Held by several companies | Public and permanent | Not linkable |
| Who else learns about the purchase | Bank, card network, processor, fraud services | Everyone, forever | Nobody |
| Can it be reversed if something breaks | Yes — chargebacks exist | No | No — refunds are sent as a new payment |
| Privacy is the default | No | No | Yes, on every transaction |
| Accepted by LunoVPN | Yes | Via supported processors | Yes, directly |
Cards and app stores are convenient and entirely reasonable choices — we accept them and never store the identity behind them. This table is about what happens outside our systems, at the companies in the middle.
Two halves of the same idea
LunoVPN and Monero solve opposite ends of the same problem, and neither is complete without the other. One removes the identity from the service; the other removes it from the money.
What LunoVPN removes
- No email, name, phone or address — a random 16-digit account number instead
- No activity logs: no browsing history, no DNS queries, no session timestamps
- Your IP is never logged, stored, or linked to your account
- Independently audited across 131 controls, with the report published in full
- Open-source apps, so the claims can be inspected rather than trusted
What Monero removes
- No bank, card network or processor sitting in the middle
- The receiving address is one-time and cannot be linked to a merchant
- The sender is concealed, so there is no thread to follow back
- The amount is encrypted, so purchases cannot be matched to price lists
- Privacy applies automatically — there is no setting to forget
Put them together and there is no single place where the two facts “this person exists” and “this subscription exists” are written down together. We cannot connect them because we never collected the first one. The chain cannot connect them because it never published the second. That is not a promise about our good intentions; it is a description of data that was never created.
How to pay in five steps
Get some Monero
Buy XMR wherever suits you — an exchange, a peer-to-peer trade, an atomic swap or an ATM — and move it into a wallet whose keys you control.
Pick your plan and choose Monero
Select monthly, three months or yearly at checkout, then choose Monero as the payment method. There is no account form to fill in and no email to confirm.
Send the exact amount to the one-time address
We generate a fresh address just for this invoice and quote an exact XMR amount, locked for the invoice window. Send it from your own wallet rather than straight from an exchange.
Wait for the first confirmations
Monero blocks arrive roughly every two minutes, so your payment is usually detected and confirmed within a few minutes.
Your 16-digit account activates
The subscription switches on against your account number alone. No email was ever collected, and the payment carries no identity.
Not just the paranoid
Private payment gets framed as an extreme choice. In practice the people who use it are mostly ordinary, and their reasons are mundane.
Journalists and their sources
A subscription receipt in a bank statement is a starting point for anyone reconstructing who a reporter was talking to and when. Removing the payment record removes that starting point.
Researchers and security professionals
Studying hostile infrastructure often means visiting it. Neither the tooling nor the billing trail should make that research attributable to an individual.
Small businesses and freelancers
Competitors and data brokers can learn a surprising amount from procurement records. Private payment keeps ordinary operational decisions out of commercial intelligence feeds.
People in difficult personal situations
Anyone whose device, cards or statements are visible to someone else in their household has a practical reason to keep a subscription off the record.
Anyone who simply prefers privacy
You do not need a threat model to want the curtains closed. Most people who pay us in Monero are not hiding from anyone — they just don’t see why a purchase should be anyone else’s business.
What a Monero payment tells us about you
The complete list, not a summary. If it isn’t in this table, it doesn’t exist on our side.
| Data point | Do we get it? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your name | NO | Never requested, and the payment doesn’t carry one |
| Your email address | NO | There is no email field anywhere in signup |
| Your billing address | NO | Nothing is being shipped or verified |
| Your bank or card details | NO | No bank sits between you and us |
| Your wallet address | NO | The sender is concealed at the protocol level |
| Your IP address | NO | Never logged, stored, or linked to your account |
| Browsing history & DNS queries | NO | Resolved in memory, never written down |
| The amount you sent | YES | Visible to us as the invoice recipient — concealed from everyone else on-chain |
| Your 16-digit account number | YES | It identifies a subscription, not a person |
| Whether your plan is active | YES | Required to let you connect |
Prefer independent verification to our word? Read the 131-control audit report →
The words people use around this
Privacy discussions are full of jargon that makes simple ideas sound forbidding. Here are the terms you’ll meet, without the mystique.
Stealth address
A one-time destination address generated for a single payment. Even someone holding our published address cannot search the chain and find payments made to us, because the address that actually appears on-chain is used once and never again.
Ring signature
A signature scheme that proves a valid spend took place without revealing which of several possible inputs was the real one. It is the mechanism that conceals the sender rather than merely renaming them.
RingCT (confidential transactions)
The system that encrypts transaction amounts on-chain. The network can verify that inputs and outputs balance without any observer being able to read the figure involved.
Fungibility
The property of money where every unit is interchangeable with every other. On a transparent chain, coins carry a permanent history and can be flagged or refused because of where they have been. Concealed histories keep every unit equal.
Chain analysis
The commercial practice of de-anonymising blockchain activity by following inputs, clustering addresses, matching amounts and linking to identity records held at exchanges.
KYC (know your customer)
The identity verification regulated financial services perform before letting you trade. KYC records live with the exchange, not on the chain — which is why where you buy matters more than what you buy.
Pseudonymous vs anonymous
A pseudonymous system replaces your name with a stable identifier that still follows you everywhere. An anonymous system does not issue you a persistent identifier at all. Bitcoin is the first; Monero aims to be the second.
No-logs policy
A commitment that a provider does not record what you do. It is only meaningful when it has been examined by someone independent — ours was assessed across 131 controls.
Four things worth knowing first
Monero is the most private way to pay us, but it isn’t magic and we’d rather you knew the edges before you start.
A regulated exchange will usually verify your identity before selling you crypto, which records that you bought Monero. It does not record what you spent it on. If you want to avoid that record too, peer-to-peer trades, atomic swaps and ATMs are the usual routes.
Paying us directly from an exchange account creates a link between the identity that exchange holds and the moment your subscription activates. Withdrawing to a wallet you control first removes that link entirely.
The rate is locked when the invoice is generated. Sending less leaves the invoice unpaid, and network fees come out of your wallet on top — so send the exact figure shown, not the figure minus fees.
There is no email to send a reset link to. If you lose the 16-digit number, neither we nor anyone else can recover the account. Save it in a password manager before you pay.
Refunds under the 30-day guarantee apply to Monero payments too — sent back in XMR to an address you provide, or as account credit. See how the guarantee works →
Monero payment questions
Why does LunoVPN accept Monero?
Is paying for a VPN with Monero legal?
Can a blockchain analysis company trace my Monero payment?
How is Monero different from Bitcoin for privacy?
Do I need an account or email to pay with Monero?
How long does a Monero payment take to confirm?
What if the exchange rate moves while I’m paying?
Can I get a refund if I paid in Monero?
Will buying Monero require identity verification?
Which Monero wallet should I use?
What do you actually see when my payment arrives?
Is Monero worth it if I have nothing to hide?
No card. No bank. No name.
Sixteen digits for the account, Monero for the payment, and no link between them for anyone to find.
Pay with Monero