Silent Payments

Silent Payments is a privacy mechanism specified in BIP-352 that lets a receiver publish one reusable "silent payment address" without sacrificing the privacy benefit of fresh addresses per transaction.

The mechanism, simplified:

1. The receiver publishes a single long-term silent-payment public key (encoded as an sp1... address).
2. A sender constructs a payment by combining their own private key with the receiver's silent-payment key (an ECDH-style operation), deriving a unique on-chain destination per payment.
3. The receiver scans the chain for outputs matching the derivation pattern, and finds their payments.

What this buys, compared to the alternatives:

• No address reuse on-chain. Each payment lands at a unique Taproot output. Chain observers see normal-looking single-use addresses.
• No notification transaction. Older payment-code systems like BIP-47 required a separate on-chain "notification" that publicly outed the user as using payment codes. Silent Payments has no such handshake; the sender's derivation is invisible.
• No protocol change required. Silent Payments uses existing Bitcoin script primitives. It's a wallet-layer protocol, not a soft fork.

The tradeoff is receiver-side scanning cost. To find payments, the receiver's wallet must check every Taproot transaction on the chain against their silent-payment key. This is workable on a full node or a beefy server, less ideal on a light wallet.

BIP-352 was formally adopted in 2023. As of 2026, several wallets and node implementations ship Silent Payments support; broader adoption is in progress. It's the most credible practical "stealth address" mechanism on Bitcoin today.

See Stealth Address for the historical context, and Address Reuse for the problem this solves.