Monero Stealth Addresses: How One-Time Addresses Protect You

A Monero stealth address is a one-time address that the sender creates for a single payment to you. You share one public address, but what appears on the blockchain is a fresh address derived from it, used once and never again. The result is that your public address never shows up on the chain, and outsiders cannot link your payments together. This guide takes the mechanism apart. For the full picture of how it fits with ring signatures and hidden amounts, start with how Monero works.

The short answer

The Monero project describes stealth addresses this way: the sender generates a new, random one-time address for each transaction sent to the recipient. The recipient can publish a single address, yet each payment lands on a different address on the blockchain that cannot be tied back to the published address or to other payments. Only the sender and the recipient can tell where a given payment went.

The problem stealth addresses solve

On Bitcoin, an address is also a public account number. If you give someone your address, they can look it up and read every payment it has ever received. Reusing an address links your payments together, and one slip, like posting it next to your name, exposes the full history.

Wallet developers on Bitcoin work around this by generating a new address for each payment, which takes care and discipline. Monero builds that discipline into the protocol. You can reuse a Monero address a thousand times, and the blockchain will show a thousand unrelated destinations. The privacy does not depend on you remembering to do anything.

How a one-time address is made

A standard Monero address holds two public keys: a public spend key and a public view key. The address documentation lays out the structure: a network byte, the two public keys, and a checksum, encoded as 95 characters. Those two keys are the ingredients for stealth addresses.

When someone pays you, their wallet does this, in plain terms:

1. It reads your two public keys from your address.
2. It picks a fresh random secret for this transaction. Nobody else can guess it, and it is never reused.
3. It mixes that secret with your public view key, then combines the result with your public spend key. This produces a new one-time key that is mathematically tied to you but does not look like you.
4. It writes that one-time key into the transaction as the output's destination, and also publishes a helper value derived from the random secret, so your wallet can later redo the calculation.

If you want the exact formulas, the open textbook Zero to Monero walks through them. You do not need them to use Monero safely.

How your wallet finds your payments

If the blockchain only shows one-time addresses, how do you know which ones are yours? Your wallet checks. For every new output, it takes the helper value published in the transaction and combines it with your private view key. If the output was built from your address, the numbers line up and the wallet marks it as yours. If not, they do not, and the wallet moves on.

This is why a wallet has to scan the chain, block by block, to build your balance. Nothing on the chain says "this is yours." Your wallet has to try every output and keep the ones that pass. Starting from the right block saves a lot of work; see what the restore height is. A small hint called a view tag, added in the August 2022 network upgrade, lets wallets skip most non-matching outputs quickly and speeds up scanning.

The private view key does this job on its own, which is why a view key can power a watch-only wallet: it recognises your incoming payments but cannot spend them.

Spending from a one-time address

Recognising the payment is not enough, you also need to spend it. The private spend key, combined with the same shared secret your wallet just found, produces the secret that controls that one-time output. Nobody can calculate it without your spend key, so seeing the one-time address on the chain gives an outsider no power over the money.

When you do spend, the output joins a ring and its fingerprint becomes a key image, as explained in Monero ring signatures. The two features work as a pair: stealth addresseshide where money arrived, rings hide where it left from.

What it means for publishing an address

You can post a Monero address on a website, a donation page, or a profile without handing out your payment history. Because of stealth addresses, someone who finds it cannot look it up on a block explorer and see what you received. There is nothing to look up: the address never appears on the chain.

Keep these edges in mind:

• The payer knows. Someone who paid you can see that you received it, because they made the payment. If you give the same address to many people, each of them knows only their own payments, but they can compare notes off chain.
• Posting next to your name links you to the address. It does not reveal your balance, but it does tell the world that this address, and anyone who pays it, is connected to you.
• Sharing your view key shares your history. The view key can recognise incoming payments, so give it only to someone you trust.

If you want to run a shop, collect from several clients, or separate savings from spending, the better tool is a subaddress. That is the next section.

Stealth addresses vs subaddresses

These are easy to confuse, because both involve "extra addresses." They solve different problems and operate at different layers.

Both work together. When someone pays one of your subaddresses, their wallet still creates a one-time stealth address for that payment. Read what a Monero subaddress is to see when it is worth making extra ones.

What stealth addresses do not hide

Stealth addresses protect the receiver's identity on the chain. They are one layer of three, plus separate considerations about the network. Here is what they do not cover:

• The sender, who is hidden by rings, not by stealth addresses.
• The amount, which is hidden by RingCT.
• What the node you connect to can see about your wallet's activity, such as your internet address and when you connect.
• What an exchange knows. If you withdrew to your address from a service that checked your ID, the service knows you received that withdrawal.

What you do in practice

Nothing, which is the point. There is no "create stealth address" button, because every Monero payment already uses one. Copy your address from your wallet, share it, and let senders' wallets handle the rest. The address validator can check that an address is well formed before you send to it.

Ready to try it? Open a MonkStash wallet to see your address and receive a small test payment, or read how to receive Monero for the step-by-step version. For the full picture, the Monero project's own Moneropedia entry is a good companion.