The NordBastion polar-bear mascot at a Nordic stone altar with a luminous Monero-orange circular emblem floating in front of him, ring-signature glyphs orbiting, cyan-N shield leaning beside him

How-to·8 min read · 15 min hands-on · Updated 2026

How to pay for a VPS with Monero.
Five steps. Twenty minutes. No identity check.

From "I have never used Monero" to a booted Stockholm VPS paid in XMR. Tested on Feather, Cake Wallet and the official Monero GUI.

The five steps

01
Install
Feather, Cake or Monero GUI
02
Acquire XMR
DEX, swap, or P2P cash
03
Top up
Panel → QR code
04
Wait
~20 min, 10 conf.
05
Order
Boot in 90 s

Step 01 · Install

Pick a Monero wallet, write down the seed.

Three options cover everyone. Feather is a desktop light wallet — fast to set up, audited, and the default recommendation if you do not already have a preference. Cake Wallet is the mobile equivalent with a built-in swap if you arrive holding some other coin. The official Monero GUI is the right pick if you want to run your own full node and validate every transaction yourself.

Install from the project site (not a third-party app store mirror — check the signature on the download), open the wallet, create a new account, and write down the 25-word seed phrase on paper. Not in a screenshot, not in a password manager, not in a text file on the same machine. Paper, in a sealed envelope, in a drawer. The seed is the wallet; lose it and the funds are gone.

Choose Tor in the wallet settings if it is offered (Feather defaults to Tor when available; the GUI has a remote-node-over-Tor option). This protects layer-3 network anonymity on the wallet side — the act of broadcasting a Monero transaction still reveals an IP, and routing it through Tor closes that hole.

Step 02 · Acquire

Get the XMR. Three paths, all viable.

Path A — Decentralised exchange. Haveno (the Bisq successor) and Bisq itself match buyers and sellers peer-to-peer with no central account. You pay in fiat via SEPA, Wise or cash; the seller releases XMR from escrow once payment arrives. Fees are 0.1-0.4% plus the fiat method's cost. Time: 30 minutes to 6 hours depending on the seller.

Path B — Instant swap. cake.swap (inside Cake Wallet), exch.cx, fixedfloat and similar services accept BTC, LTC, ETH or USDT and return XMR with no signup, no email, no identity. Fees are 1-2%. Time: under 30 minutes. Convenient if you already hold another coin.

Path C — Peer-to-peer cash. LocalMonero (closed 2024) had this model; today the in-person market is fragmented across local meetups and Monero community channels. Highest privacy if you have access; impractical for many customers. Worth mentioning for completeness.

Whichever path you pick, the goal is XMR in your own wallet, with no record linking your real-world identity to a wallet address that subsequently pays NordBastion. Each path achieves that to a different degree of strictness; the right one is the one that fits your threat model.

Step 03 · Top up

Generate the address in the panel.

Sign in to the panel, click Top up, choose Monero as the currency, enter the USD amount you want to credit. The panel returns three things: a one-time stealth Monero address, a QR code that encodes the address plus the exact XMR amount, and an expiry timestamp 24 hours in the future.

Copy the address into your wallet, or scan the QR. The QR carries the amount so you do not have to retype it; this prevents the most common error, which is sending the wrong number of decimal places. Confirm the recipient address character-by-character before broadcasting — Monero stealth addresses are 95 characters of base58, and a single-character typo means the funds reach a different recipient and are unrecoverable.

If you prefer the API instead of the panel, POST to /v1/billing/topups with {"coin":"XMR","amount_usd":50} and you get back the same three things in JSON. The full reference is at /api/.

Step 04 · Wait

Ten confirmations, about twenty minutes.

Once you broadcast, the Monero network propagates the transaction across nodes in seconds. The first block including your transaction is mined in roughly 2 minutes on average; subsequent confirmations stack at the same pace. NordBastion credits the balance after the 10th confirmation, which works out to about 20 minutes from broadcast to credit.

The panel shows live progress: 0/10 → 1/10 → 5/10 → confirmed. If you have subscribed to webhooks, a topup.confirmed event fires the moment the credit lands. If something goes wrong — wrong amount, transaction stuck because of insufficient fee, address expired — the panel surfaces a clear error and you can retry. We do not have unresolvable edge cases here; if you reach one, the support channel inside the panel handles them.

Step 05 · Order

Pick a tier, a bastion, an image. Boot in 90 seconds.

In the panel, click Order. Pick one of the five VPS tiers (Sentinel through Citadel) or one of the five dedicated tiers (Bastion-Lite through Bastion-Hyperion). Pick a bastion — Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo or Reykjavík. Pick an OS image (Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, Arch, FreeBSD, Windows, or a custom template). The first month is deducted from your prepaid balance; the panel shows the new balance immediately.

The server provisions in about 90 seconds for VPS, about 30 minutes for dedicated. Root password and SSH access are shown on the panel once; copy them into your password manager. Subsequent panel-driven actions — power, snapshots, reinstall, resize, migrate to another bastion, console — all work the same way and do not require any further crypto top-ups until your prepaid balance runs out.

Why Monero, not Bitcoin

Chain-analysis vs ring signatures.

Bitcoin transactions are public ledger entries that link addresses through their input-output graph. Chain-analysis firms reconstruct flows backward from the host's receiving wallet to the customer's sending wallet to the exchange that funded it to the bank account that funded the exchange. Monero replaces each of those links with a ring signature, a stealth address and a confidential amount, by default, on every transaction.

When Bitcoin is still fine

When the host already knows nothing.

If your threat model concedes that NordBastion does not know who you are and does not need to — which is what the doctrine and the privacy policy say — Bitcoin gets you the same outcome with broader liquidity. The Bitcoin + Lightning guide is at /guides/how-to-pay-vps-with-bitcoin-lightning/ for the practical walk-through.

FAQ · Monero

Questions, answered.

Eight questions a first-time Monero payer asks before broadcasting.

Why pay with Monero specifically?

Because every Monero transaction uses ring signatures, stealth addresses and confidential transactions by default. There is no public ledger entry an investigator can chain-analyse backward from the host's wallet to the customer's wallet. With Bitcoin the chain is public and traceable; with Monero there is no chain to walk. For threat models that include "an adversary acquires the host's payment history", that is the meaningful difference.

Which Monero wallet should I install?

Three options cover most cases. Feather is the best desktop light wallet for everyday use — fast, audited, sane defaults. Cake Wallet is the equivalent on mobile, plus it has a built-in swap if you arrive with another coin. The official Monero GUI is the right pick if you want to run a full node and validate transactions yourself. All three are free, open-source and produce the same Monero standard outputs.

How long does a Monero confirmation take?

Monero produces a block every 2 minutes on average. NordBastion credits the balance after 10 confirmations, which works out to roughly 20 minutes of wall-clock time from when you press Send in the wallet to when the panel says Confirmed. A topup.confirmed webhook fires when the credit lands if you have subscribed to one.

Can I acquire Monero without using a KYC exchange?

Yes, three usable paths. Decentralised exchanges (Haveno, Bisq) match buyers and sellers peer-to-peer with no central account. Instant swaps (cake.swap, exch.cx, fixedfloat) accept BTC or LTC or ETH and return XMR with no signup. Peer-to-peer cash on local meetups remains the highest-privacy option if you have access to one. Each has a different fee profile and convenience trade-off; the privacy outcome is broadly similar.

What if I send the wrong amount?

NordBastion credits whatever amount confirmed on the published address, converted to USD at the market rate at confirmation time. Send a little more than needed and the surplus credits to your balance. Send less and the balance credits with what arrived; you can top up again to make up the difference. The address remains valid for 24 hours after creation.

Is my IP visible when I broadcast a Monero transaction?

Yes — the act of broadcasting any cryptocurrency transaction reveals your IP to the network nodes you broadcast to. Three mitigations: (1) use a wallet that supports Tor (Feather has it built in, the Monero GUI has it via a setting). (2) run your own remote node over Tor. (3) route the wallet through a system-level VPN. All three are independent of NordBastion — they protect the broadcast, not the recipient.

Does NordBastion ever see my Monero wallet address?

Only the stealth address generated for your specific top-up — which is, by Monero design, a one-time output unlinkable to the wallet that paid into it. NordBastion does not see your real public wallet address or any prior transaction history. The visibility on our side is one stealth address, one inbound amount, one confirmation event.

Are there any minimum or maximum amounts?

The minimum is $10 USD-equivalent — below that the network fees become a non-trivial fraction of the top-up and the customer is generally better off batching. There is no hard maximum, but for first-time customers we recommend a small top-up to test the flow end-to-end before committing larger amounts.

Ready