What is Wownero and how is it related to Monero?

Wownero (WOW) is a separate privacy-focused cryptocurrency built from Monero’s code, with a playful, meme-driven identity. It shares much of Monero’s technical foundation, but it has its own network, mining rules, coin supply, and community—WOW is not another name for XMR.

How Wownero grew out of Monero

Wownero launched in April 2018 as a code fork of Monero. That means its developers copied open-source software—code anyone can inspect and reuse—and changed it to create a different project.

You can think of it as two apps that started from the same source code but developed separately.

Wownero did not give you WOW simply because you held XMR. Its blockchain—the shared record of transactions—started separately. The two coins are not interchangeable, and you cannot send WOW to a Monero address.

Monero itself launched on April 18, 2014, with roots in Bytecoin and the CryptoNote protocol. Wownero came later, borrowing Monero’s privacy-focused approach rather than being an official Monero upgrade.

What they share—and what differs

Both projects aim to keep payments private by default. Their shared technical roots include:

• Ring signatures: These mix a payment’s actual spending input with decoys, making it harder to identify which earlier funds were spent.
• Stealth addresses: These create one-time receiving destinations, so public transaction records do not directly reveal your published wallet address.
• Hidden amounts: Their transaction technology conceals how much you send.

Shared ancestry does not mean identical security. Changes to software, the size of the network, and how people use it can all affect real-world privacy.

Their personalities and economic rules also differ. Wownero leans heavily into jokes, memes, and experimentation. It targets roughly five-minute blocks, compared with Monero’s roughly two-minute blocks. A block is a batch of transactions added to the chain.

Wownero also has its own supply schedule. You should not apply Monero’s permanent reward of 0.6 XMR per block to WOW.

What this means for mining

Monero uses RandomX, a mining algorithm designed to favor CPUs—the general-purpose processors in computers. Wownero uses RandomWOW, a related but distinct algorithm.

That distinction matters if you are comparing mining options:

• Software that mines XMR does not automatically support WOW.
• Your hashrate, or number of mining calculations per second, may differ between the two algorithms.
• Rewards depend on each network’s competition, block rewards, and coin value.

Wownero has also introduced mining rules intended to discourage conventional mining pools and favor solo mining. Solo mining means you seek block rewards yourself rather than sharing work and payouts with a pool. For a small miner, rewards can be extremely irregular.

Browser mining adds another limitation: running inside a web page generally gives you less efficient access to your processor than dedicated mining software. A site claiming to support Monero does not necessarily support Wownero.

The bottom line

Wownero is best understood as Monero’s independent, meme-oriented relative—not a replacement or an official companion coin. If you explore it, use a WOW-compatible wallet, check current mining documentation, and compare live estimates rather than assuming Monero’s numbers apply. Never share your wallet’s recovery words with a mining website; those words give control of your funds.