Stealth vs mixers vs shielded pools
Three ways to get privacy on Ethereum, what each hides, what each costs, and how ephemeral combines with the others.
Privacy on Ethereum is not one product. Different tools hide different parts of a payment. ephemeral covers where a payment lands. It works best next to tools that cover the rest.
What each one hides
| Stealth addresses (ephemeral) | Shielded pools | Mixers | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hides the receiver | yes | yes, inside the pool | partly |
| Hides the sender | no | yes, inside the pool | partly |
| Hides the amount | no | yes, inside the pool | fixed denominations |
| Funds pooled with others | no | yes | yes |
| Sender needs special software | no, with a private name | yes | yes |
| Works for any token or NFT | yes | per pool | per pool |
| Receiver can prove income to an accountant | yes, viewing key | depends on the pool | hard |
Examples of shielded pools are Privacy Pools and Railgun. Their exact properties differ; check each one's own documentation.
Why the receive side matters
Shielded pools protect money while it sits inside them. Most payments in the real world start outside any pool: a salary from a company, an invoice paid by a client, a grant from a DAO. The payer will not join your pool to pay you. A stealth address needs nothing from the payer except a meta-address, or with a private name, nothing at all.
How they combine
- Pools hide the trail; ephemeral hides where it lands. Pay out of a shielded pool to a stealth address, and neither the sender nor the receiver is visible.
- Receive, then shield. Funds that land on a stealth address can go straight into a shielded pool without passing through your main wallet. A one-step version of this is on the roadmap.
- Agents and payroll. A payer with many recipients can send each one to a fresh stealth address, so no recipient's income is readable from one place.
What stealth addresses do not do
- They do not hide that a payment happened, or its amount.
- They do not protect funds after you link the address yourself. Most traced stealth payments were traced this way; see the leak study.
- They do not hide the sender. For that, the sender needs private funds of their own.
Private names: ENS and CCIP-Read
How name.ephmrl.eth will resolve to a fresh stealth address on every lookup, who publishes the announcement, and what the gateway can and cannot do.
Stealth Buy on Uniswap v4
Buy any token on a Uniswap v4 pool straight into an ERC-5564 stealth address, with gas included and an announcement the receiver's wallet can find.