What Is Stealth Address?
Also known as: Stealth Addresses, One-Time Address, ERC-5564
In short
A stealth address is a privacy technique in which the sender derives a new, single-use address for every payment even if the recipient shares one public address, making it harder to link payments to the recipient on-chain.
On public blockchains, all payments arriving at an address can be seen by everyone; someone who shares their address to collect donations also reveals their total balance and who they received payments from. In a stealth address system, the recipient publishes a special “meta address.” The sender calculates a new address from this meta address and a random value they generate, using elliptic curve cryptography, and makes the payment there. The recipient scans the chain with a secret viewing key to find payments that belong to them, and only they can spend them.
An outside observer cannot tell that these single-use addresses belong to the same person. Monero uses stealth addresses by default at the protocol level. On Ethereum, the aim is to standardize stealth addresses with the ERC-5564 proposal.
Stealth addresses protect the recipient's privacy but do not on their own hide the amount sent or the sender's identity; additional techniques such as confidential transactions or ring signatures are needed for that. In addition, the recipient later consolidating funds into a single address can reduce the privacy gained.
Last updated: · This content is for information purposes only and is not investment advice.