Crypto Gloss

Stealth Address

A stealth address is a privacy mechanism that lets a recipient publish a reusable public meta-address while each payment is delivered to a fresh, one-time address derived by the sender. The recipient can scan for and spend from those outputs, while an observer has a harder time connecting them to the published address. Ethereum’s ERC-5564 standardizes a stealth-address scheme; it does not make the entire transaction private.

The Basic Flow

  1. The recipient creates spending and viewing keys and shares a stealth meta-address that encodes the relevant public keys.
  2. The sender combines the recipient’s public information with fresh ephemeral randomness to derive a one-time destination address and a shared secret.
  3. The sender transfers an asset to that address and publishes the ephemeral information needed for scanning, commonly through an announcer mechanism.
  4. The recipient scans announcements with the viewing key, identifies outputs addressed to them, and derives the corresponding spending key.

The two sides can derive the same secret from different key material without publishing the recipient’s private key. The precise scanning and encoding rules depend on the standard and wallet implementation.

What It Hides and What Remains Visible

A new address for each receipt can reduce the direct link between a recipient’s public donation address and their incoming payments. This is useful when an ordinary wallet address would expose a growing list of receipts.

Stealth addresses are not mixers. The sender, asset, amount, time, and transaction remain visible on a public chain unless another mechanism hides them. Behavioral analysis may connect addresses, and a recipient can reveal a link by consolidating funds or spending to a known wallet. Funding a stealth address from a publicly identified wallet can also expose a relationship.

Ethereum Standards

ERC-5564 defines a non-interactive stealth-address scheme for Ethereum, including an announcement interface that helps recipients discover payments. ERC-6538 defines a registry for publishing and looking up stealth meta-addresses. These standards make integrations more consistent, but they do not guarantee that every wallet, token, chain, or application supports the same flow.

A meta-address is intended to be shared; it is not itself a private key. Users still need to protect their spending and viewing keys and understand what their wallet scans or stores.

Costs and Practical Limits

  • Scanning: A recipient or service must monitor announcements and test derived addresses. Large histories and many chains can make scanning a usability and infrastructure task.
  • Fees and dust: A small receipt may cost more to move than it is worth, especially if the recipient must make a separate transaction from each one-time address.
  • Linkability: Funding, consolidation, timing, and spending patterns can weaken privacy even when address derivation is correct.
  • Compatibility: Wallet support, token handling, address derivation, and recovery procedures must match the chosen standard.

Social Media Sentiment

  • A March 2025 thread in r/ethereum about stealth-address donations received 23 votes and a handful of replies. The question focused on whether gas fees can make small receipts impractical and whether stealth addresses protect the sender too; replies pointed out that receiver privacy is not sender privacy. It is a small practical discussion, not a broad user survey.

Last updated: 2026-10

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