Despite the privacy gains, $COTI’s post is explicit that stealth addresses have real limits. On transparent chains like Ethereum and Bitcoin, the fact that a transfer happened, the sender’s address, and the payment amount all remain publicly visible, as does the timing of the transaction. The post also flags a more subtle leak: a freshly generated stealth address typically holds no native token to pay gas fees, so topping it up from a main wallet can inadvertently link the two addresses together, undoing much of the privacy benefit the scheme was meant to provide.
To underscore how real this risk is in practice, the post cites a 2023 academic study of Umbra, an Ethereum-based stealth address tool, which found that researchers could re-link somewhere between roughly 26% and 66% of payments back to their likely recipients, depending on the network studied. The leading cause was not a flaw in the cryptography itself but ordinary user behavior, such as withdrawing stealth funds to a previously used address or consolidating several stealth payments into a single destination, patterns that create exactly the kind of address reuse the scheme is designed to avoid.
$COTI connected the explainer to its own roadmap, noting that its planned Interphase product is expected to use stealth addresses to support private cross-chain transfers, with a target delivery window between the fourth quarter of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027. The post, published on $COTI’s official blog, said Interphase’s roadmap also calls for automatically funding gas on behalf of recipients and building in a privacy check that would warn users before a withdrawal risks linking a stealth address back to their identity, directly addressing the gas-funding leak the post itself describes.
This post first appeared in $COTI Explains Why Stealth Addresses Don’t Make You Invisible
