Silent Payments.
Bitcoin's answer to address reuse.

Section 1 · The address-reuse problem

When you reuse a Bitcoin address:

• Everyone who sends to you can see each other's payments.
• Chain analysis can link all your activity to one identity.
• Your balance becomes visible to anyone who knows the address.

The current workaround: generate a fresh address for every transaction. This requires interaction. Every sender needs to contact you for a new address.

Static addresses (donation links, social-profile addresses) break this completely.

Section 2 · How Silent Payments work

Silent Payments (BIP 352) solve this with a static shareable address that generates a unique on-chain address for each sender, without any interaction verify×DON'T TRUST, VERIFYClaim: BIP 352 (Silent Payments) defines a non-interactive payment scheme using static recipient addresses.Verify at: BIP 352 specification ↗BIP 352 was authored by Josie Baker and others. The scheme uses ECDH-based key derivation..

The sender does the work

1. The sender takes your published Silent Payment address.
2. Combined with their own UTXOUnspent Transaction Output (UTXO)The fundamental unit of Bitcoin accounting, the "coins" you hold that have been received but not yet spent.Full definition and a cryptographic computation, they derive a unique address to send to.
3. No two senders derive the same address.
4. The receiver scans the blockchainblockchainImagine a spreadsheet that tracks every Bitcoin transaction ever made, copied identically on thousands of computers worldwide. To rewrite a past entry, an attacker would have to change it on a majority of those computers at the same instant. That is mathematically impractical. That is why Bitcoin transactions cannot be undone.Full definition to find payments (more computationally intensive than standard wallets, but tractable).

Result: one address to share, many unique on-chain receiving addresses, no linkage between them.

Section 3 · Status as of 2026

• BIP 352 is finalized and in development across multiple wallet projects.
• Wallet support is early. Verify which wallets currently support Silent Payments before relying on the feature.
• Resource: silentpayments.xyz (community tracker for implementation status).

For now, the practical privacy baseline for most users remains: do not reuse addresses, label UTXOs in Sparrow, and avoid combining KYCKnow Your Customer (KYC)Identity verification requirements that financial institutions use to confirm who their customers are.Full definition with no-KYC UTXOs. See /sparrow-wallet-guide/.