A quick walkthrough over the most important tools and services RINO provides to everyone on the "Community tools" page, free of charge and without the need for any registration.

Here at RINO, we are deeply committed to the Monero ecosystem, and work every day to improve the lives of its users, developers and the overall community.

We believe that Monero is a fundamental tool for a better society, and we want to help as much as we can. For this reason, other than our enterprise wallet (something that was missing before we launched last year), RINO also provides a set of tools and apps to help the community interact with the Monero network, either for exploring its possibilities or for building new software and services on top of it.

In this post, we will go through the most important tools and services we provide to everyone on our "Community tools page", free of charge and without the need for any registration.

High-quality nodes

Not everyone has the hardware to run their own Monero node. Even those who have the hardware don’t open their node’s RPC API to the public. This means most users need to find a trusted public node to synchronize their wallets (mobile or not).

To solve these problems, RINO provides 3 reliable, high-quality public nodes, one for each Monero network. A mainnet node for users, a stagenet node for app developers and a testnet node for Monero's software testers.

One thing that should be mentioned is that when using RINO Wallet, you don't need to deal with connections to Monero nodes, since your wallet is always automatically kept up to date.

The details of those nodes can be found here.

Faucets

For all the fantastic developers building apps, tools and services on top of Monero, we provide faucets with funds for the two networks meant for testing. We don't want you to have a hard time getting funds to test your apps or new releases of Monero.

You can find our stagenet faucet here and our testnet faucet here.

RINO stagenet version

For testing purposes, there's also the test version of RINO wallet, available on https://test.rino.io. It allows you to create both community and enterprise accounts that use the stagenet network. These accounts are a great fit to easily play with Monero, debug your apps, etc.

Monero block deviations

Just like on other proof-of-work blockchains, Monero blocks are mined when they meet a certain difficulty parameter, which is automatically and periodically adjusted to produce new blocks at a predictable rate. In Monero's case, it should be every 2 minutes.

However, this tends to be the case only in the long run. In the short term, some variation is expected. So, with our block deviations visualization tool, you can inspect how this fundamental process is behaving.

These deviations can explain why the network is slower or faster than usual and why some of your locked funds are taking longer to be available again.

Monero network map The health of the Monero network is not only dependent on the miners being able to produce new blocks. It also needs a decent number of nodes (validating blocks and transactions), from multiple parties and spread across multiple jurisdictions.

The bigger the number of nodes and the more decentralized they are, the better. To track the size of the network and its evolution through time, we built the Network map.

With this tool, we can see the localization of the majority of "publicly" known nodes, their software version, how in sync they are and which "hard fork" they support. To make it even better, you can go back in time and see the evolution of the network size, of its morphology, and of the software of each node.

Hard fork countdowns

Monero has the tradition of frequently hard-forking the chain, to introduce many new security, privacy and performance improvements. This is how developers and researchers that work on Monero usually stay ahead of the curve.

However, these hard-forks require a huge deal of preparation and synchronization between all agents, since the node software must be upgraded and all the wallets, tools and services that depend on it might need to be adapted or tuned.

To help with these efforts, the RINO team maintains a public record of the past and the upcoming hard-forks for all 3 networks. On these pages (mainnet, stagenet and testnet), we provide all the relevant information for users and developers, such as expected activation date, block height, difficulty, etc.

As a RINO user or application developer, you don't need to worry about the hard forks, since our team is on top of the situation and will have everything ready, to automatically upgrade the infrastructure when the time comes.

And much more

In addition to what was described above, in our Community Tools page you can still find many other smaller, yet useful, projects such as:

Monitoring of Monero seed nodes

Docker images for Monero

Open-source packages

RINO doesn't have the intention of stopping here, we believe in the power of Monero and its usefulness to society. So, in the coming months and years, we will continue to work together with the community to improve Monero and extend its reach.

If you have ideas and proposals for new tools and services that will benefit the whole, feel free to reach us through our official channels, we will be glad to hear from you and help if necessary.

It is possible to recover your funds from a multisig wallet created with RINO’s website using Monero’s official software.

Organizations and groups of individuals often face the challenge of managing shared access to common funds, in a way that provides them the required flexibility to execute their day-to-day operations while maintaining a certain level of security.

In the fiat world, one can rely on banks for this service. In the crypto world, this often requires custodial wallets and services. An alternative available in the crypto world are multi-signature wallets. However, these are harder to get right and don't provide many features that organizations need to operate and stay compliant. Features that are usually readily available in the custodial offerings.

Monero even adds a few other layers of complexity to achieve the same outcome, because of its focus on security and privacy (that we all love). Regular wallets are a great fit for individuals, but not well suited for organizations and other groups. Multi-signature is available, but hard to work with, error-prone and time-consuming.

This is where RINO comes in. With its 2-out-of-3 multi-signature wallet model, it makes it possible to provide the same convenience and the same feature set of most custodial offerings, without having any access to the user's funds. Even when sharing access to a wallet with spending permissions, no other party has full control of the wallet aside from the owner.

In this post, let's explore the sharing features that RINO provides for both its community and enterprise offerings.

How it works

How RINO works is "simple": the owner of a wallet has 2 of the 3 keys, giving him full control of the funds. RINO has access to the third key (alone, it cannot do anything).

One of the owner's keys should be safely stored offline, and the other is meant to be used regularly. The latter is the one that will be shared with other users if they are added to the wallet and have "spending" permission.

With this setup, RINO will enforce the permissions and configurations set by the wallet owner/admin, by only adding the second signature when the created transactions are compliant. Remember that RINO is unable to access the funds without prior validation of a user with the access to the second key.

User roles

With the setup described above, RINO implements 5 user roles that are common in most organizations, communities and groups of people in general. Two of those roles are available in the community version, while all of them are available in the enterprise version.

You should take this into consideration when signing up, since RINO has different "forms" for consumer and enterprise accounts.

Community accounts

When managing your wallets using a community account, you will only be able to give admin access to other users, since only 2 roles are supported. The same happens the other way around.

The basic roles available in RINO’s community offering are the following:

Owner: The owner has full privileges over the wallet. It can basically do anything that is supported by RINO, such as editing wallet settings, sending funds, generating subaddresses, etc. One peculiar aspect of this role is that this membership can't be removed from the wallet. There can only be one owner.

Admin: Users with the admin role have the same permissions as an Owner. However, multiple of them can exist at the same time, and these roles can also be revoked/removed by the owner or the other admins.

Both roles have access to 1 of the 3 keys, which will allow them to move funds when cosigned by RINO.

Note that while these two roles exist in the community version, they don’t have access to several features that are exclusive of the enterprise version (approvals, transaction limits, etc.).

Enterprise accounts

In addition to the 2 roles above, enterprise accounts can share wallet access using more granular roles, this is very useful for bigger organizations where more control and scrutiny is necessary over the actions done with a wallet.

The additional roles available in RINO’s enterprise offering are:

Spender: Users with this role have access to 1 one of the keys, so they can create new transactions and sign them. However, it is not guaranteed that a transaction will be accepted by RINO, since RINO will only cosign if/when it complies with the wallets requirements/settings. This role cannot edit the wallet settings.

Approver: The approver role doesn't have access to any wallet key. Users with this role can view the wallet and its activity, but cannot spend funds or edit any settings. Nevertheless, they can approve pending transactions that require a minimum number of approvals before RINO signs and publishes them.

View-only: As it is obvious from the name, when a user has the “view-only” role on a shared wallet, that user will only be able to see the wallet data, without having the power to change the wallet state in any way.

In the end...

Different users will have distinct requirements for either the security of their wallets and the access model that allows them to operate efficiently. RINO was built to provide the tools and the convenience to address the day to day Monero operations of individuals and organizations, without compromising the security and the custody of the funds.

If any doubts persist, or you would like to discuss these features in more detail, feel free to reach us using the support channels, we will be glad to help and to hear any feedback you might have.

Otherwise, stay tuned, we have many more features and improvements coming soon.