Can I share my wallet address with a mining pool safely?
Yes, you can usually share your public Monero receiving address with a mining pool so it can send you payouts. Your address alone does not let anyone spend your XMR, but sharing it is not completely private: the pool can connect that address with your mining activity and any other details you give it.
What is safe to share?
A mining pool combines the work of many miners and divides the rewards. It needs a receiving address to know where to send your share.
You can provide the address your wallet shows under Receive. This is different from the secret information that controls your wallet.
Never give a pool:
- Your recovery seed: the secret words used to restore your wallet.
- Your private spend key: the secret that lets someone spend your funds.
- Your wallet password or wallet backup file.
- Your private view key: a secret that can reveal incoming payment details. A normal pool does not need it to pay you.
If a pool asks you to “verify your wallet” by entering recovery words, stop. That is a strong sign of a scam. Receiving a payout does not require giving the sender control of your wallet.
What can the pool learn?
Monero hides payment amounts, recipients, and senders on its public transaction record, called the blockchain. Someone who only knows your address cannot simply look up your balance or complete payment history.
The pool still knows what happens inside its own service. It may record:
- Your receiving address and payouts it sends you.
- Your mining speed and connection times.
- Your IP address, which is your internet connection’s network address.
- Any account details, such as your email address.
Some pools also let anyone look up mining statistics by entering a payout address. Depending on the pool, that could expose your unpaid balance, payout history, or mining activity.
So, treat your receiving address as safe for receiving money—not as information that has no privacy value.
Use a separate address for the pool
If your wallet supports subaddresses, create one specifically for mining. A subaddress is an extra receiving address controlled by the same wallet. You do not need a separate recovery seed for it.
Using a different subaddress for each pool helps you avoid handing the same identifier to several services. It also makes your incoming payments easier to organize.
Check that the pool supports Monero subaddresses before using one. A subaddress does not hide your activity from that pool, and it does not remove records the pool already holds.
Check where you enter it
Copy your receiving address directly from your wallet and compare the full pasted address before saving it. Malicious software can replace copied crypto addresses with an attacker’s address.
Also check the pool’s payout threshold, fees, and reputation. A safe-to-share address does not make an untrustworthy pool safe: the operator could still withhold your earnings.
If you enter an address into a browser-mining website, check whether that website, the pool, or both receive and store it. Do not assume they are the same operator.
The bottom line
Share only your public receiving address, preferably a dedicated subaddress. Keep your recovery words and private keys secret, and remember that the pool can associate your address with the mining and payout records it collects.
