HAVENO Exchange About
About the project
An open-source, non-custodial exchange built around Monero, and the reasoning behind that choice.
About Haveno
Haveno is an open-source peer-to-peer exchange. It exists because the usual way to convert money into Monero — a custodial exchange that collects your identity documents and holds your coins — undoes most of the reason to use Monero in the first place.
The shape of the project
It is a desktop client rather than a website. That is a deliberate constraint: a website would mean a server that could be compromised, pressured, or quietly changed under you. Software that runs on your own machine, holding its own keys, has a much smaller surface to attack and a much shorter list of parties you have to trust.
Open source, and why it matters here
Financial software that asks you to hand over custody can be judged on reputation. Software that asks you to keep custody has to be judged on its code, because the guarantees it makes are only as good as the implementation behind them. Being able to read, build, and verify that code yourself is the point.
Read before you trust
The security model is written down in plain terms, including the parts that cost you something.
No central operator
Trades happen between peers. There is no company sitting in the middle holding balances.
Why Monero
XMR is the base currency for every pair on Haveno, and that is a design decision rather than a preference.
Privacy by default
On a transparent chain, privacy is something you have to work for and can lose retroactively: a single linked address can expose a history that was fine yesterday. Monero's amounts, senders, and recipients are hidden at the protocol level, so the privacy does not depend on how carefully each user behaves.
Fungibility
Coins with visible histories can be treated differently from one another — screened, flagged, refused. When transaction history is not visible, one unit is interchangeable with any other, which is what makes a currency usable as a currency.
Multisignature that fits the job
Monero supports the multisignature escrow the trade protocol depends on, so the same asset that provides the privacy also provides the settlement mechanism. That keeps the design simple: one chain, one wallet, one escrow.
Project status
Haveno is a desktop client for Linux, Windows, and macOS, distributed from this site.
What to expect
- Trades are between peers, so the experience depends on there being someone on the other side offering the pair and payment method you want.
- Self-custody means recovery is your responsibility. Keep your seed phrase somewhere you will still have it after a disk failure.
- Verify each build you download. The instructions are in the documentation.
Start with a small trade. It costs a little in fees and tells you far more about how the flow actually works than any amount of reading.