A stealth address is a one-time address that the sender creates for each payment. It means you can publish a single Monero address, yet every payment you receive lands at a different, unlinkable address on the blockchain. No outside observer can connect those payments to your published address or to each other. This is how Monero hides the receiver.
Stealth addresses are Monero's receiver-privacy layer. Where ring signatures hide who sent a payment, stealth addresses hide who received it, so a payment cannot be tied to your identity through your address.
To see why this matters, it helps to start with the problem stealth addresses were built to solve.
The problem stealth addresses solve
On a transparent blockchain, your address is public, and every payment sent to it is visible forever. Anyone who learns your address can see your balance and your incoming payments and link them together. Reusing one address only makes this worse. Stealth addresses fix the problem by never putting your real address on the chain at all.
This is a real weakness of transparent chains, not a hypothetical one. Bitcoin, for example, is not anonymous and leaves extensive public records, so payments to a known address can be traced and connected (source: Bitcoin project, FAQ). If you post a donation address publicly, or hand it to one person who later looks it up, your receiving history is exposed. The usual advice on transparent chains is to use a fresh address for every payment, but that is awkward, easy to get wrong, and still leaves the payments sitting on a public ledger. Think about a freelancer who lists a single wallet address to get paid. On a transparent chain, every client, and anyone those clients tell, can look up that address and watch the freelancer's whole income arrive, payment by payment. That is the exposure stealth addresses remove. The generic version of this problem, and why address reuse is risky, is covered in address reuse and privacy risks. Monero takes the problem off your hands entirely, which is what the rest of this guide explains.
What a stealth address is
A stealth address is a one-time address generated for a single payment. In Monero, the sender's wallet creates a fresh one-time address for every transaction on your behalf. You publish just one public address, but the payments themselves are delivered to unique addresses that only you can recognize as yours.
The key idea is that publishing an address and receiving to it are separated. Monero's own documentation puts it directly: stealth addresses require the sender to create random one-time addresses for every transaction, so the recipient can publish a single address yet have all incoming payments go to unique addresses that cannot be linked back to the published address or to each other (source: Monero project, Moneropedia: stealth address). Only the sender and the receiver can tell where a given payment actually went. For you, nothing changes in practice: you share one address and receive payments normally. The privacy happens underneath, as part of how the whole system works, described in how Monero works. The published address is a kind of template, and each payment produces a new, disposable address from it. It helps to separate two things that sound similar. Your public address is a long-lived label, the kind you can print on a business card or a website. The one-time addresses are throwaway destinations, one per payment, that live only on the chain. You manage the first; the network manages the second, and only your keys connect them.
One published address, many one-time addresses
So how does one address become many? When someone pays you, their wallet combines your public address with a piece of random data to derive a brand-new one-time address, and sends the payment there. Because the random data is different every time, every payment produces a different address, and none of them can be linked to each other.
The person paying you does this work, not you. Their wallet generates the one-time public key from your address, which is why stealth addresses are described as public keys generated by the sender that are untraceable to the receiver by a network observer (source: Wikipedia, Monero). An outside observer watching the chain sees a stream of unrelated one-time addresses, with no way to group them or trace them back to you. Contrast that with a transparent chain, where every transaction sits on a shared public ledger that anyone can read and follow (source: Bitcoin project, how it works). If the idea of on-chain privacy is new, the primer on Bitcoin privacy basics is a useful companion. The important point is that the unlinkability is automatic and applies to every payment, not something you have to set up. Crucially, the process only runs one way. The sender can create the one-time address from your public address, but no one can run it backward to recover your public address from the one-time one. That asymmetry is what keeps the payments unlinkable, the core unlinkability property set out in the original CryptoNote design that Monero is built on (source: CryptoNote v2 whitepaper).
A simple example: paying Bob privately
A quick example makes it concrete. Bob publishes one Monero address on his website. Alice decides to pay him. Alice's wallet takes Bob's address, mixes in fresh random data, and produces a brand-new one-time address that exists only for this payment. Alice sends the money there, and Bob's wallet later spots it as his.
Walk through what each party sees. Alice knows she paid Bob, because she started with his address. Bob knows the payment is his, because his view key recognizes the one-time output as belonging to his account. But a third party watching the blockchain sees only a payment to a one-time address that appears nowhere else and connects to no one. If Carol pays Bob a minute later, her payment goes to a completely different one-time address, and nothing on the chain reveals that both went to the same person. Bob can publish that single address on a hundred sites and receive a thousand payments, and each one still lands somewhere unlinkable. The published address is reused freely; the on-chain addresses never repeat. For Bob, the experience is no different from having a normal address, because the privacy is invisible to him too.
The view key: how you find your own payments
If your payments go to addresses you did not create, how do you find them? With your private view key. Every Monero account has a view key that lets your wallet scan the blockchain and recognize the one-time outputs that belong to you. It is the tool that turns all those anonymous addresses back into your balance.
This is where Monero's key design comes in. Your account has a private view key and a private spend key. The private view key is required to view all the transactions related to your account, which is exactly how your wallet detects incoming stealth payments (source: Monero project, Moneropedia: view key). The spend key is what lets you actually spend what you find. This split enables something useful: you can share only your view key to give someone read access to your incoming payments, for accounting or an audit, without giving them the ability to spend. The full roles of both keys are covered in Monero's view and spend keys. This is why watch-only wallets exist. Loaded with only the view key, they can display everything coming in but cannot move a single coin, which is ideal for a business that wants its accountant to reconcile receipts without ever touching the funds. In short, stealth addresses hide your payments from everyone, and your view key is the private lens that lets you, and only you, see them.
Stealth addresses and the rest of Monero's privacy
Stealth addresses solve one piece of the puzzle, the receiver. Monero pairs them with two other layers: ring signatures hide who sent a payment, and confidential transactions hide the amount. All three are mandatory and run on every transaction by default, which is what makes Monero private as a whole rather than only for careful users.
No single layer is enough on its own. Hiding the receiver still leaks information if the sender or the amount is visible, so Monero combines all three, and the project describes the result as a currency where the sender, receiver, and amount of every transaction are hidden by default (source: Monero project, what is Monero). The amount is hidden by ring confidential transactions, which work alongside stealth addresses on the same payment. The layers are independent but complementary. You could imagine a system with only one of them, and it would still leak, because a hidden receiver alongside a visible sender and amount tells an observer a great deal. Monero's decision to make all three mandatory is what closes those gaps. From the vantage of an exchange operator, stealth addresses are why a Monero deposit address behaves differently from a transparent-chain address: the same address can be reused safely because, on-chain, nobody can link the payments to it. That is a structural observation about the protocol, not a comment on price. Stealth addresses are the receiver-side piece, and they reach full strength as part of the set.
The honest limits: what stealth addresses do and don't do
Stealth addresses are powerful but narrow. They hide who received a payment, on the blockchain, and nothing more. They do not hide the amount or the sender by themselves, they do not help if you link your own address to your identity elsewhere, and they cannot protect you once an exchange or a person already knows who you are.
It is worth being precise about the scope. On-chain, stealth addresses are very strong: your published address never appears, and payments to you cannot be grouped or traced. Off-chain is a different matter. If you post your address next to your real name, or reuse it in a context that identifies you, that connection lives outside Monero, and stealth addresses cannot undo it. The same goes for buying or selling on an exchange that knows your identity, where the link between you and your withdrawals is made off the chain. Your view key is also sensitive, because sharing it exposes your incoming payments to whoever holds it. None of this weakens the mechanism; it just marks its edges. It is worth noting that stealth addresses have held up well over time. Unlike some early weaknesses in decoy selection on the sender side, the receiver protection has not been the subject of the same traceability breakthroughs, largely because there is simply nothing on the chain to correlate in the first place. The realistic risks are the human ones: linking your address to your name, or trusting a third party who already knows who you are. For the fuller real-world picture of what is and is not private, whether Monero is safe is the right next step.
Frequently asked questions
What is a stealth address?
A stealth address is a one-time address created for a single payment. In Monero, the sender's wallet generates a fresh one for every transaction, so you can share one public address while each payment you receive lands at a different, unlinkable address on the chain. It is the feature that keeps your real address off the blockchain and hides the fact that you received anything at all. You never have to manage these one-time addresses yourself; the software handles them behind the scenes.
Do I have to create a new address for every payment?
No, and that is the whole point. You publish one Monero address and reuse it freely, while the sender's software automatically creates the one-time address for each payment. Unlike a transparent chain, where reusing an address harms your privacy, reusing your Monero address is completely safe, because nothing links the payments to it on-chain. This is one of the ways Monero makes privacy the default rather than a chore you have to manage.
Can anyone see payments made to my Monero address?
No. Your published address never appears on the blockchain, and the one-time addresses your payments arrive at cannot be traced back to you or grouped together. Only you, using your private view key, can identify which payments are yours. To an outside observer scanning the chain, your receiving activity is effectively invisible, which is exactly what stealth addresses are designed to achieve.
What is the view key for?
The view key lets you, or someone you choose to share it with, see incoming payments to your account without being able to spend them. Your wallet uses it to scan the chain and find the stealth payments meant for you. Sharing it is how you can give an accountant or auditor read-only visibility into your receipts while keeping your funds fully under your own control, since spending still requires the separate spend key.
Do stealth addresses hide the amount and the sender too?
No. Stealth addresses hide the receiver only. The amount is hidden by a separate mechanism called ring confidential transactions, and the sender is hidden by ring signatures. All three run together by default on every Monero transaction, but each covers a different part of the privacy problem, so it takes the full set working together to make a payment private from end to end.
Is a stealth address the same as using a fresh Bitcoin address?
No, and this is a common mix-up. A fresh Bitcoin address is still public and permanently visible on the ledger, and payments to it can be linked with analysis. A Monero stealth address is generated by the sender and is unlinkable by design, so it protects you automatically rather than depending on you to keep generating new addresses and never reusing them. The privacy is built into the protocol instead of resting on careful habits.
Can I prove I received a payment without exposing everything?
Yes. Because Monero separates viewing from spending, you can share your view key or a specific payment proof to demonstrate that a payment arrived, without handing over the ability to spend and without necessarily exposing your entire history. This selective transparency is useful for audits, disputes, or accounting, and it is a deliberate feature rather than a loophole.
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. Updated July 2026. Sources: the official Monero Moneropedia at getmonero.org, the Bitcoin project documentation at bitcoin.org, the Monero entry on Wikipedia, and the CryptoNote v2 whitepaper. All facts independently verified against cited documentation current as of July 2026.
This article is educational and general in nature, not financial, legal, or tax advice. Cryptocurrencies like Monero carry real risks, including price volatility and regulatory changes, and privacy technology is strong but never an absolute guarantee of anonymity. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset. BloFin offers the XMRUSDT perpetual contract for trading; to get started, create a BloFin account, fund it with cryptocurrency, and open the XMRUSDT perpetual contract trading page. Do your own research and consider a licensed professional before making financial decisions.