The untapped potential of stealth addresses

Duration: NaN:NaN:NaN

Speaker: Hugo Volz Oliveira

Type: Lightning Talk

Expertise: No prior knowledge

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

Stealth addresses are one of the few privacy primitives with standards, an SDK and five years of mainnet history. However, they remain underused and are often used in ways that don't ensure user privacy. This talk will cover the history of stealth addresses and how they work, including ERC-5564 and ERC-6538 and its non-interactivity UX capabilities; share adoption data from the most widely used implementation; as well as anonymity research showing that users often let observers identify the real recipient of roughly half of stealth payments across mainnet and L2s. We'll then cover the four deanonymization heuristics and its countermeasures. Lastly, we'll focus on what it implies for wallet teams and the wider EVM privacy roadmap. Attendees leave understanding both the cryptographic scheme and the operational reality of deploying it, drawn from building and maintaining this infrastructure since 2020.