Stealth Addresses and Private Transfers

Stealth addresses let a sender pay a recipient without publishing the recipient's long-term address on chain. Instead, the sender derives a one-time address from the recipient's public meta-address; only the recipient can detect and spend incoming funds. Monero has used stealth addresses natively for years; Ethereum adopted the idea through EIP-5564 and related standards.

EIP-5564 defines an events-based signaling format so wallets can detect incoming stealth payments. Companion proposals cover encoding, registry formats, and integration with account abstraction. Wallets must implement scanning — a UX challenge because recipients actively look for payments rather than watching a single public address.

Stealth addresses pair well with other privacy tools: a user might receive via stealth address, then move funds into a ZK pool for larger unlinkability. On their own, they solve the "don't reuse my public address" problem that exposes donation wallets and salary recipients on transparent ledgers.