In case you didn’t know, since version 1.5.9 Monerujo supports two of the latest Monero features: accounts and subaddresses. This opens a lot of possible ways to organize and optimize your Monero usage, but as with life itself, too many choices can overwhelm you. Fear not, I’ll go into each of them and explain what they are and how they work.

Accounts

Until now, you only had one public address per wallet, and funds received on it showed up on the wallet’s only balance after syncing with the blockchain.

That means that you had to create as many wallets as different addresses you wanted to hand out, or as many wallets as funds you wanted to keep apart. For example creating one wallet for work-earned XMR, one for donations, one for OTC purchases. That doesn’t sound like much, but it means keeping three different seeds safe and private, and keeping three separate wallets synced to know if new funds appeared on them (believe me, that’s not fun).

Now you have the ability to create accounts inside each wallet. If your wallet was like a safe, accounts work as boxes inside to keep things tidy and ordered. Of course each box comes with its own address, so funds sent to each one appear under their respective account.

Notice that your old wallet single address is now the account #0, so funds received before accounts were possible will appear there.

When you open your wallet, you can see the total balance of all its accounts added together, but by entering each account, you see the individual balances as well. Following our previous use case, it will look like this:

Subaddresses

If you thought accounts were fun, this is taking wallet management to cypherfun levels. Remember how each account came with its own address? Well, you can also create lots of addresses per account. It means than funds sent to any of those addresses will arrive to that account and no other.

For example, this wallet has three accounts. Account #0 has only one address, while account #2 has two.

The most obvious use of subaddresses is increased privacy. While Monero is truly private, and no one can see how much you have or who’s sending XMR to you, there are a couple of situations where reusing addresses could help a third party deduce some of your movements or even identity.

Another use case could be to easily match incoming transactions with a particular sender. Monero transfers are so private you don’t know who sent you those shiny XMR you just received, but if you give a new subaddress to someone and nobody else, you can be sure where those funds are coming from.

Subaddresses can be reused and it’s not mandatory to create a new one for each incoming transaction. That means for example you can have a dedicated donation address posted on your website for years, and you’ll be fine.