No email. No KYC. No name. We sat down with the team behind XMR.WIN to talk custody, oracles, AI agents as first-class users, and why they kept the whole thing denominated in Monero.
Why did you build XMR.WIN?
Most prediction markets want your identity first — email, KYC, sometimes a bank account. That rules people out, and it defeats the point if you care about privacy. We'd run XMR.BAR for over a year, so we knew there was a community that wanted to do things without handing over their life. Prediction markets were the obvious next step: genuinely useful, and nobody was building a properly zero-KYC one denominated in XMR, where it doesn't matter who you are and we don't want to know.
For readers who are new, what is a prediction market in simple words?
It lets you bet on the outcome of a future event — an election, a sports result, a price move. Each outcome has a price that moves as people buy and sell, like a stock. If "Yes" trades at 60 cents, the market is saying roughly a 60% chance. You profit by being right before the crowd: buy when you think they're wrong, sell when they catch up, or hold to resolution.
Can you walk us through placing a bet, step by step?
- Create an account — no email, no KYC.
- Deposit your crypto.
- Pick a market and take a side: Yes or No on event markets, Up or Down on crypto markets, which run in rolling 10-minute and 1-hour windows (more may come in the coming weeks).
- You see your price and potential return before you confirm.
- Winning positions settle to your balance automatically when the market resolves, and you can withdraw to your own wallet whenever you want.
When a user deposits XMR, who holds the funds — you or the user?
While your funds are on the platform, we hold them. It's fully custodial, and I won't pretend otherwise — your deposit sits in our wallets until you place positions or withdraw, which is what lets the market clear instantly instead of waiting on-chain. So yes, you're trusting us, same as any exchange. What you control is how much you keep here and for how long. You can withdraw anytime, and we'd rather you kept only what you're betting and held the rest yourself.
What assurance can users have that their funds are safe?
Their caution is right, and anyone calling a custodial platform risk-free is lying, so I won't. What we suggest is: bet what you came to bet, then withdraw — the less time we hold your crypto, the better. Beyond that:
- The hot wallet follows strict security practices.
- The cold wallet is multisig, held across several team members.
- Each of us has posted a bond larger than total platform deposits, so a rogue insider would lose more than they could ever steal.
- Our incentives are tied to your funds staying put, and XMR.BAR has run cleanly for over a year — that reputation is worth far more to us than any balance here.
Is XMR.WIN open source?
No, it's closed source, for two reasons. Mainly because we're a for-profit venture and we're not handing competitors a copy the second it ships. The second reason is security: a public codebase on a platform holding funds is a public map of where to attack, and with the advances in adversarial AIs, we prefer to keep things private for now. Our answer to "how do I trust it?" is the track record and the fact that you can withdraw at any point.
Where does your price data come from — what is your oracle?
It depends — there are two main cases. For real-world events, markets resolve from official and reputable sources, and every market states up front exactly which source decides it, so there's no ambiguity once the result is in. For crypto markets, prices come from Hyperliquid, with other mainstream exchanges as fallback. The rule throughout is that the resolution criteria are written into the market before you bet, not decided afterward.
Besides no email and no KYC, how else does the site protect privacy — and will there be a Tor onion mirror?
The biggest win is structural: there's no identity to leak because we never collect one (no email, no KYC, no name, no bank account). We also have 2FA and Passkey available in user settings to make sure your account never gets accessed by an attacker. A Tor mirror is coming in the next few weeks, but it will still require JS, unfortunately.
Your site has a "For AI Agents" page and an llms.txt file. How do AI agents fit into the platform?
Agents are first-class users, not a bolt-on — basically anything a person can do, an agent can do through our public API or MCP. To make that easy, we ship docs for both people and machines, like the llms.txt, so a model understands the site without scraping, and an MCP server so an agent plugs in with almost no effort. For where we think things are heading, we decided to build for them rather than treat them as something to block.
How much AI was used to build XMR.WIN, and what's your stance on that?
Quite a bit, and I won't hide it. The frontend was largely built with AI, then cleaned up and refined by humans — a lot of sweat went into it. The backend is different, though, because the engine and the money paths were written by people, not AI. The LLM's role there was as a reviewer: stress-testing logic, surfacing edge cases, catching strange bugs — and it's found real ones. My view is simple: AI is an excellent tool, and paired with a great team it boosts productivity by at least 10x.
What do you see for the future of the platform — is anything new coming?
This week we're launching more markets, and anyone can suggest one — our team checks that it's resolvable and well-defined, and the community votes on which one goes live next. In a month or so we'll add withdrawals in any crypto (markets will remain denominated in XMR).
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Disclaimer: This interview is provided for informational purposes only and is not financial advice. Prediction markets and custodial platforms carry risk, including the total loss of deposited funds. Do your own research.
