# Stealth Addresses

Source: https://www.philmohun.com/stealth-addresses
Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/Stealth-Addresses?index=0x6752ea5222682b825ff704376caea24f51d1b1081a094b074518c154b04ee32217621237
Submitted by mozrt.eth on 2024-12-06 UTC, 14 upvotes, 3 comments

## Summary

Stealth addresses are presented as a practical way to keep Ethereum transactions private, and the author says the Fluidkey product makes them usable. The article explains that stealth addresses let users receive funds without exposing their public key or transaction history, by giving senders a one-time-use address instead of a main account. The author says they previously created many accounts in Metamask to do this, which was hacky and poorly suited to managing balances. Fluidkey lets users log in with a single address, generate new addresses automatically, and view all balances from one dashboard, and it uses ENS so people can send payments to a readable name such as philm.fkey.eth.

## Article

All transactions and account balances on Ethereum are public by default. This transparency is a tradeoff that comes with the self-custody of finances through a public blockchain. But as far as tradeoffs go, it’s a significant one. Imagine if you could see everyone’s bank account details on LinkedIn—this creates strange social dynamics and raises serious privacy concerns.

That's why I'm constantly on the lookout for new onchain privacy products that help maintain anonymity across my wallets. One of the most straightforward approaches is the use of stealth addresses.

Stealth addresses allow users to receive funds without exposing their public key or transaction history. When someone wants to send you $20, you provide them with a one-time-use stealth address instead of your main account. This way, your financial activities remain private, and your professional and personal transactions don’t co-mingle.

Without stealth addresses, it's easy to co-mingle professional and personal transactions

For years, I’ve implemented my own version of stealth addresses by creating new accounts in Metamask. This method was hacky and, frankly, provided a poor user experience. Managing balances across hundreds of wallets became a tedious task.

Recently, I discovered a product that ‘just works’ called Fluidkey. Fluidkey allows you to log in with a single address and generate new addresses on the fly. This is a significant upgrade in terms of user experience and privacy. I can view and manage my balance across all of my accounts from a single dashboard. Fluidkey’s use of ENS means I can send my friends the same human-readable address, like ‘philm.fkey.eth’, and any payment will automatically be routed to a fresh stealth address.

Left: Manually creating hundreds of "stealth addresses" in Metamask; Right: Fluidkey interface

Privacy solutions that "just work" are essential for broader adoption. Fluidkey is one of the first products I’ve seen that balances privacy and usability, eliminating the need to choose between the two.

## Comments

**mozrt.eth**: hi everyone, this is my first submission to Kiwi :) thanks to Mac for helping me get started

Phil wrote this post a few months after trying out Fluidkey, the product I'm building

if you have any thoughts, feedback or questions about it, I'd love to engage here

**macbudkowski.eth**: I saw the demo at Devcon, and it looked slick. And it's good that it works on L2s because Railgun IIRC works only for Mainnet, meaning sending money there is expensive.
 
I have one question about privacy - IIRC, Fluidkey needs to have view access to display all my stealth addresses in the dashboard. How is this access protected from the risk of Fluidkey getting hacked and the data about the links between stealth addresses getting out?

 

**mozrt.eth**: Thanks mac!

Yes, currently Fluidkey requires view access to enable a UX that is as smooth as regular wallets.

It's a tradeoff we took and are transparent about as it still allows for much stronger privacy than the current default while removing a lot of the friction other privacy solutions bring with them.

Now to your question - first off, we limit the amount of data we collect to the bare minimum: you can get started just by connecting with a wallet address that doesn't have any past history. We are of course also making sure to follow best practices in terms of data security.

In an ideal world, Fluidkey v2 doesn't even require any view access, but for this to work there are some fundamental technical challenges still to solve. For example, you'd need to be able to generate stealth addresses and resolve them via ENS with FHE or another technology that allows the whole process to happen in a fully encrypted way. We have some ideas around this, but it's definitely still early days.

Until then, I'd recommend using Fluidkey in combination with other privacy best practices.

Btw if you are interested in diving deeper, this is a great report about stealth addresses: https://simbro.medium.com/privacy-in-ethereum-stealth-addresses-f05016109010