Stealth address

A stealth address is a receiver-privacy technique in which every payment lands at a unique address that the sender derives from the recipient's published public keys. From an observer's perspective, no two payments to the same recipient share the same on-chain address — there is no visible "wallet address" to cluster incoming payments to.

In Monero, this is the default and automatic. Every transaction generates a fresh output address using cryptographic key derivation involving the recipient's view and spend keys. The recipient can scan the blockchain with their view key to detect payments intended for them; observers cannot. This means the on-chain view of the recipient is fragmented into a stream of unrelated one-time outputs.

Stealth addresses eliminate the "address reuse" leak that plagues UTXO chains like Bitcoin, where reusing a single address across payments allows observers to cluster the recipient's activity. Combined with ring signatures (hiding the sender) and RingCT (hiding amounts), stealth addresses give Monero its default on-chain privacy properties. Bitcoin has an analogous idea — BIP-47 payment codes and Silent Payments — but neither is used by default.