Stealth Addresses

Imagine handing someone your bank account number and knowing that no matter how many times they pay you, that number will never appear on any public record. That is exactly what Monero does with stealth addresses. They are the first of Monero's three core privacy technologies, and they solve a deceptively simple problem: how can you receive money in public without the whole world seeing your address?

The Problem With Reusable Addresses

On a transparent chain like Bitcoin, your address is written directly into every transaction that pays you. Reuse that address and anyone can scroll a block explorer to see your full balance and history. Even with fresh addresses, the public ledger still records exactly which address received which coins. Monero refuses to make that trade-off. Your real address — the long string starting with 4 that you learned about in Public and Private Keys — never appears on the blockchain at all.

One-Time Addresses, Generated by the Sender

When someone pays you, their wallet does not write your address into the transaction. Instead it uses your two public keys to mathematically derive a brand-new, one-time address (also called a stealth address) that exists only for that single payment. The funds are sent there. Because the math involves a random number the sender picks, every payment lands at a different one-time address — even two payments from the same person to the same you look completely unrelated on-chain.

The clever part is that only you can recognize and claim these outputs, even though the sender created them.

How Your Wallet Finds Its Money

If your address never appears on the chain, how does your wallet know which of the millions of outputs belong to you? This is where your private view key earns its keep. Your wallet scans each transaction and uses the view key to test whether a given one-time address was derived for you. When it finds a match, it can see the output. To actually spend it, you also need your private spend key. That split is why a watch-only wallet can detect incoming funds without being able to move them.

• Sender uses your public keys plus a random value to create a one-time address.
• The chain records only that anonymous one-time address — never your real one.
• You use your private view key to spot it and your private spend key to spend it.

What Stealth Addresses Do and Don't Hide

It is important to be precise. Stealth addresses hide the receiver — they break the link between a payment and your published address. They are not what hides the sender, and they are not what hides the amount. Those jobs belong to two companion technologies:

• Ring signatures conceal who spent the coins — see Ring Signatures.
• RingCT conceals the amount — see RingCT and Hidden Amounts.

Together these three give Monero privacy on every transaction by default. Stealth addresses are the receiver-side layer.

Why This Matters in Practice

Because of stealth addresses, you can publish a single Monero address on a website, a donation page, or a business card and use it forever. No observer can total up how much you have received or link separate payments to one another. This is a big reason Monero is genuinely fungible: since no coin can be traced back to your visible address, no coin carries a public "history" that makes it worth less than another.

This also means there is no public explorer that can show your balance. You verify your own funds with your wallet and keys — a theme we return to in Checking Your Transactions. You can read a formal definition in the community Moneropedia.

Stealth addresses are elegant: the sender does the work of hiding the receiver, and only the receiver can find the result. Next we will flip to the other side of the transaction and see how ring signatures hide who actually spent the coins.