What Are Stealth Addresses and Why Monero Uses Them
A Monero stealth address is the privacy feature that hides the recipient of a payment. Here is the core idea: even though you hand out one public address, every payment you receive is actually delivered to a fresh one-time address that only you can detect and control. Your real address never appears on the blockchain, so nobody can scan the chain and see how much you have received or link your payments together. This post explains how stealth addresses work and why they are essential to Monero.
The recipient privacy problem
On a transparent blockchain, your receiving address is a permanent public identifier. Anyone you give it to, and anyone watching the chain, can see every payment that address has ever received and the running balance behind it. Reuse one address across a few payments and your entire financial picture becomes visible.
Stealth addresses fix this from the recipient side. They let you publish a single address while ensuring that the addresses recorded on the blockchain are all unique and unlinkable, so no observer can connect them back to you or to each other.
Two keys behind one address
A Monero address encodes two public keys, a public view key and a public spend key. These are derived from two private keys that your wallet holds. The split is what makes stealth addresses possible.
The view key lets you detect and read incoming payments. The spend key lets you actually move the funds. Keeping them separate is also useful in practice, because you can share a view key with, say, an accountant or auditor so they can see incoming funds without ever being able to spend them.
How a one-time address is created
When someone sends you Monero, their wallet does not write your published address to the chain. Instead it generates a brand new one-time public address for that specific payment, derived from your public keys plus a random value the sender produces.
Because the sender mixes in fresh randomness each time, every payment lands at a different destination on the blockchain. Two payments from the same sender to the same person produce two unrelated on-chain addresses. There is nothing on the ledger that visibly ties them together.
How your wallet finds money meant for you
This raises a fair question. If every payment goes to a different one-time address, how does your wallet know which outputs on the blockchain belong to you? The answer is the view key.
Your wallet scans the chain and, for each output, uses your private view key to check whether that one-time address was constructed for you. When the math lines up, your wallet recognizes the output as yours and adds it to your balance. Nobody else can perform this check, because nobody else has your view key. To everyone else the output is just another anonymous one-time address among millions.
Spending what you receive
Detecting a payment is not the same as being able to spend it. Recovering the private key for a one-time address requires your private spend key, which never leaves your wallet. That is why you can safely hand a view key to a third party for visibility without giving up control of the funds.
When you do spend, the one-time output becomes an input to a new transaction, where ring signatures then hide which input you used. Stealth addresses and ring signatures cover different halves of the same goal, the recipient and the sender, and they work together on every transaction.
Why stealth addresses are not optional in Monero
On some chains, privacy features are an extra mode you have to opt into, and most users never bother. Monero makes stealth addresses mandatory for every transaction. There is no transparent fallback and no way to send to a reused public address by accident.
That universality is a privacy feature in itself. When everyone uses one-time addresses, no single transaction looks special, and there is no smaller pool of privacy users to single out. The protection is the default, not a setting.
What this means for you
Stealth addresses mean you can publish a donation address, an invoice address, or a personal address without exposing your balance or your payment history to the world. Each payment is its own quiet event on the chain.
If you are moving funds into Monero from a transparent coin, the receiving side of that swap already benefits from stealth addresses the moment the Monero arrives. You can swap in and out of Monero with no KYC and without anyone holding your coins along the way, so the privacy starts at the point of receipt.
Swap into or out of Monero, no KYC
MoneroSwap is non-custodial, no account, no KYC, no logs, 0% fee right now, open source, and available over Tor. Verify every claim, then pick a pair and swap into Monero. New here? Start with the FAQ.
← All guides