What is Stealth Address?
Crypto Glossary Definition
A way of sending cryptocurrency by giving additional privacy to the recipient. By using a stealth address, you ask payers to generate a unique address in such a way that you can deduce the corresponding private key. So although a single 'stealth address' can be visible in public, the blockchain sees all incoming payments as going to separate addresses.
Why Stealth Address Matters
A stealth address lets a recipient publish one address publicly while every incoming payment actually lands at a unique, derived address only the recipient can link back to themselves — an outside observer sees a series of seemingly unrelated addresses instead of a visible pattern of payments to one destination, similar in spirit to (but a different technique from) Zcash's shielded addresses.
Stealth Address in Practice
A privacy-focused nonprofit accepts cryptocurrency donations but doesn't want its public donor list, and the exact size of each gift, visible to anyone scrolling a block explorer, since large individual donations could make specific supporters identifiable and a target for harassment. Instead of publishing a normal wallet address, the nonprofit publishes a single stealth address on its donation page. When a supporter sends funds, their wallet software uses that published address to mathematically derive a brand-new, one-time address that only the nonprofit can later recognize as belonging to it, using a private scanning key it holds separately from the address itself. To an outside observer checking the blockchain, the donations appear to land at dozens of unrelated addresses scattered across the chain, with no obvious pattern linking them to the organization or to each other. The nonprofit's treasurer, meanwhile, runs software that scans incoming blocks and automatically detects which of those seemingly random addresses actually belong to the organization, tallying the total raised without ever having exposed a single reusable address publicly. This lets the group maintain transparency about accepting donations at all while still shielding individual contributors from the kind of on-chain surveillance that a normal, repeatedly reused public address would invite.
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