Litecoin · Monero
LTC to XMR, straight from your own wallet
You send Litecoin, Monero lands at an address only you control. An LTC to XMR swap runs as two ordinary on-chain transfers with an exchange in the middle, so there's no account to open and no balance sitting somewhere waiting for you to withdraw it.
Type an amount below and you'll see what today's market gives you. Below that: how the swap runs step by step, what a Monero address looks like so you can check yours before pasting, and how long each chain takes to confirm.
- ~2.5 min Litecoin block
- ~2 min Monero block
- 95 characters in an XMR address
Rate check
Market prices, pulled fresh each time the page loads.
Market price only. The exchange quotes its own rate on the next screen, and that quote is the one that counts.
The reason
Why people convert Litecoin to Monero
Litecoin has been running since 2011 and it's a plain, open ledger. Anyone with the address can pull up the balance, the history, and every transfer in or out. That's fine for most things and awkward for a few. Once you've paid someone from an address, that person can keep watching it.
Monero works the other way round. Amounts are hidden, the receiving address never appears on the chain, and each spend is mixed with other outputs so an observer can't say which one actually moved. Paste an XMR address into a block explorer and you'll get nothing back — there's nothing to look up.
The honest summary: Litecoin is fast and cheap to move, Monero is quiet. People swap LTC to XMR when they want the second thing and already hold the first.
There's a practical reason too. Several large trading platforms dropped XMR from their listings over the past few years, which made buying it with a card or a bank transfer harder in some countries. Moving a coin you already hold sidesteps that entirely — it's a chain-to-chain transfer, not a purchase.
What changes, and what doesn't
The swap doesn't erase your Litecoin history. The LTC you sent stays visible on the Litecoin chain forever, including the address it went to. What stops is the forward trail: once the XMR arrives, its later movements aren't readable.
And the coin you end up with behaves differently day to day. Monero's price swings harder than Litecoin's, it isn't listed everywhere, and wallet software for it is a smaller world. None of that is a problem, but it's worth knowing before you move a large amount.
Step by step
How to swap LTC to XMR
Five steps, and the only one that needs care is the third. Set aside a few minutes — most of the time you'll spend waiting for confirmations, not clicking.
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Pick the pair and the amount
Set LTC as the coin you send and XMR as the coin you get, then type an amount. The figure you see is an estimate from market data. The exchange gives you its own quote on the next screen, after fees and spread, and that's the number to judge.
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Choose a fixed or a floating rate
A floating rate follows the market while your deposit confirms, so you may end up with a little more or a little less. A fixed rate locks the number now and charges a bit more for holding it. For a pair that moves as much as this one, locking is usually the calmer choice.
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Paste your Monero address
This is the step to slow down on. A Monero address is 95 characters and there's no way to recover coins sent to the wrong one. Copy it from your wallet, never type it, and check the first four and last four characters against the source after pasting.
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Send the Litecoin
You'll get a deposit address and an exact amount. Send from your own wallet, matching the amount as closely as your wallet allows. Some exchanges reject a deposit that's far off the quoted figure and ask you to restart.
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Wait for both chains
Litecoin has to confirm your deposit, then Monero has to confirm the payout. Nothing you do at this point makes it faster. Keep the exchange ID or the status link — it's the only way to ask about a transfer that's taking longer than you expected.
Send from a wallet you hold the keys to, not from an exchange account. Withdrawals from trading platforms sometimes arrive as several separate transactions or from an address the swap service doesn't expect, and sorting that out afterwards is slow.
Before you paste
What a Monero address actually looks like
Monero addresses are longer than almost anything else you'll have pasted, and there are three kinds. Knowing which one your wallet handed you takes about two seconds and saves a very bad afternoon.
- Standard address — 95 characters, starts with
4. This is the default your wallet shows. - Subaddress — also 95 characters, but starts with
8. Wallets generate these so you can hand out a fresh one each time. - Integrated address — 106 characters, starts with
4. It's a standard address with a short payment ID baked in.
Any of the three works as a destination for a swap. If the form rejects what you pasted, it's almost always a truncated copy rather than a wrong format — long strings get cut when they travel through chat apps and notes.
Payment IDs are mostly history
Older guides tell you to include a separate payment ID alongside the address. Modern wallets don't need one: subaddresses do the same job and are harder to get wrong. If a service still asks for a payment ID and your wallet doesn't show one, that's a sign the instructions are out of date, not that you're missing something.
And on the Litecoin side
Litecoin addresses come in three shapes as well. Legacy ones start with L, script addresses start with M, and the newer bech32 ones start with ltc1. All three are normal deposit destinations.
The one to watch for is MWEB. Litecoin added an opt-in confidential layer in 2022, and MWEB addresses start with ltcmweb1. Most exchanges won't accept a deposit from there or send a payout to it. If your wallet offers an MWEB address, keep it out of the swap.
The waiting part
Confirmations: what each chain makes you wait for
Two different networks, two different clocks. Neither is slow by crypto standards, but they don't line up, and the total is what you actually feel.
One Litecoin block. Exchanges usually want two to six of them before they treat your deposit as final.
Monero locks every output for ten blocks, around twenty minutes, before it can be spent again. That's protocol, not a policy anyone can waive.
A reasonable expectation end to end when both chains are behaving and the deposit lands in one transaction.
That ten-block lock catches people out. Your XMR shows up in the wallet and the balance reads as pending or locked for a while afterwards. Nothing has gone wrong — Monero simply doesn't let a freshly received output move again straight away.
What it costs
Fees and timing, without the guesswork
Three numbers decide what you receive, and only one of them is a line item you'll see written down.
| What | Who charges it | How it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| Litecoin network fee | The Litecoin chain | Paid by your wallet when you send. Small, and set by you or your wallet's default. |
| Monero network fee | The Monero chain | Taken out of the payout. Varies with how full blocks are. |
| Exchange spread | The service doing the swap | Built into the quote rather than listed separately. This is the big one. |
Because the spread is folded into the rate, comparing services by their stated fee tells you very little. Compare the final payout figure for the same amount instead. That's the only number that matches what lands in your wallet.
If it's taking longer than it should
Usually the deposit side. A Litecoin transaction sent with a low fee during a busy stretch can sit unconfirmed for a while, and the exchange won't start its half until yours is settled. Check the transaction in a Litecoin explorer before you assume the service is stuck.
The other common cause is an amount mismatch. If you sent noticeably more or less than the quote asked for, most services flag the order for manual review rather than processing it automatically.
The other direction
Going back the other way
Plenty of people run this in reverse — holding XMR and wanting something more widely listed. The mechanics are the same, but the checks land in different places, so it gets its own page.
Questions
What people ask before they exchange LTC to XMR
Do I need an account to swap LTC to XMR?
No. The swap runs as two transfers — your Litecoin goes out from your wallet, the Monero arrives at an address you picked. There's no balance held for you, so there's nothing to log into afterwards. Keep the order ID somewhere; it's what you'd need if you had to ask about the transfer later.
How long does an LTC to XMR swap take?
Around half an hour is a fair expectation. Litecoin needs a few confirmations at 2.5 minutes apiece, then Monero has to build and confirm the payout. A busy Litecoin mempool or a deposit sent with a low fee stretches it. Nothing on either side can be sped up once the transaction is broadcast.
Can anyone see where my Monero went afterwards?
Not from the chain. Monero hides the amount, the recipient and which output was actually spent, so a block explorer shows a transaction happened and nothing more. What stays visible is the Litecoin side: the LTC you sent, and the address it was sent to, remain public forever.
What's the minimum I can convert?
Every service sets its own floor, and it moves with the market because the minimum is really a dollar figure dressed up as a coin amount. Small swaps also lose more proportionally, since two network fees come out of the total regardless of size. The form tells you if your amount is under the limit before you send anything.
Should I pick a fixed rate or a floating one?
Fixed locks the number at the moment you agree to it and costs a little more. Floating tracks the market right up until your deposit confirms. Monero moves sharply enough that a fifteen-minute wait can shift the payout noticeably, so fixed is the one I'd take unless the price gap is unusually wide.
What happens if I paste the wrong Monero address?
The coins go to whoever holds that address and there's no way back. Monero has no reversal mechanism and no support desk that can undo a confirmed transfer. This is why copying from the wallet and checking the first and last few characters matters more than any other step in the process.
Why does my XMR show as locked after it arrives?
Monero holds every new output for ten blocks — about twenty minutes — before it can be spent. Your wallet shows the balance but marks it unavailable until that passes. It's part of the protocol and applies to every Monero transaction, not something the exchange did.
Can I swap Litecoin to Monero from a hardware wallet?
Sending the LTC from one is straightforward — it's an ordinary outgoing transaction. Receiving XMR depends on your device and the wallet software paired with it; Monero support is narrower than Litecoin's. Check that your setup can actually generate and display a Monero address before you start the swap, not after.
Is there a difference between a subaddress and a standard address?
For receiving a swap, no — both work. A subaddress starts with 8 instead of 4 and exists so you can hand out a different one to each person without them being linkable to each other. Your wallet treats funds arriving at either the same way.
Does the converter here quote the real rate?
It quotes the market price from a public data feed, which is the right starting point but not your payout. The exchange applies its own spread and the network fees come out on top. Treat the number on this page as the ceiling and the exchange's quote as the number that counts.
Set the amount, check the quote
The converter above takes you through with LTC and XMR already selected. You'll see the exchange's own rate before anything is sent.
Swap LTC for XMR