Rich by Coin

Have you ever opened Etherscan and searched for your own wallet address—not to check transactions, but simply to see what it looks like to outsiders? Your current balance, every token you’ve ever held, every NFT you’ve bought, every protocol you’ve interacted with, those late-night DeFi experiments, every airdrop claimed or ignored—everything is there, fully public. This is because Ethereum treats each address as a publicly viewable ledger, creating an on-chain financial life history that is linked to a single, permanent identifier. ERC‑5564 was designed precisely to solve this address-linkage problem by bringing stealth addresses natively to Ethereum, enabling you to receive payments without repeatedly exposing your primary wallet.

The core idea is simple: instead of sharing your wallet address directly, you provide a stealth meta-address containing cryptographic public-key information to generate a unique, one-time receiving address. When someone pays you, funds go to that new address rather than your public main wallet, and on-chain the transfer looks like a transfer to a new, never-before-used account. Each incoming payment lands at a distinct address, so history no longer endlessly accumulates under a single permanent account. ERC‑5564 achieves this without erasing transparency or introducing heavy privacy pools, focusing narrowly on reducing automatic linkage at the payment-receiving layer.

User behavior shows a strong desire for isolation, as evidenced by Tornado Cash, Railgun, and Umbra, which decouple transactions from main wallets at various costs and friction. These tools illustrate trade-offs, such as friction, regulatory gray areas, and opt-in requirements, while Umbra proves stealth payments can work as an app rather than a wallet standard. Privacy on public blockchains is a spectrum: Monero and Zcash pursue deeper privacy, while Ethereum prioritizes transparency and composability, making ERC‑5564 a lightweight, wallet-layer approach rather than a bolt-on protocol. The broader aim is to embed privacy as infrastructure within Ethereum’s wallet standards, enabling selective disclosure and preserving verifiability as adoption grows. Ultimately, ERC‑5564 isn’t about turning Ethereum into a privacy chain—it’s about giving Ethereum programmable, lightweight, native payment privacy.