What are Bitcoin silent payments?

Bitcoin silent payments are a way to receive bitcoin to one reusable address without that address ever appearing on the blockchain. Each sender's wallet turns the shared address into a brand new, one-time output that only the receiver can recognize and spend. The protocol is defined in BIP 352, a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal first drafted in March 2023.

Why does Bitcoin need a reusable address?

Reusing a normal Bitcoin address is bad for privacy, because anyone can look it up and see every payment it received. That is why wallets usually create a new address for each payment, as explained in why your Bitcoin address keeps changing. But a fresh address requires the receiver to hand one out every time, which is awkward for a donation page or a public profile.

BIP 352 aims to solve both problems at once. The receiver can publish a single address, and outside observers still cannot connect the incoming payments to each other or to that address.

How do silent payments work under BIP 352?

A silent payment address starts with "sp1" on mainnet and is long, about 116 characters, because it contains two public keys. One is a scan key and the other is a spend key. The spend key can stay in cold storage while the scan key sits on an online device.

When someone pays, their wallet combines the private keys of the transaction's eligible inputs with the receiver's scan key to compute a shared secret. That secret produces a unique Taproot output. Only standard single-key input types count, and the payment output must be Taproot. Nothing in the transaction reveals the "sp1" address, and the sender and receiver never need to talk to each other.

The receiver's wallet does the same calculation in reverse for each eligible transaction to see whether any output belongs to it.

What is the downside of silent payments?

Scanning is the main cost. A full node can handle it, but phones and light wallets need extra data for every eligible transaction, and the BIP describes trustless light client support as an open research area.

Cake Wallet's documentation shows how this plays out. Users can turn on continuous scanning, which uses battery and data, or scan only when they expect a payment. Payments are not lost if scanning is off, they simply do not appear until the wallet scans. Scanning also needs an Electrum server that supports silent payment data, and Cake Wallet falls back to its own server if the user's node cannot provide it.

Which wallets support silent payments?

Support is growing but uneven as of November 2026, and sending is more common than receiving. Cake Wallet documents both sending to and receiving at "sp1" addresses. BitBox said its BitBox02 was the first hardware wallet to support sending to silent payment addresses, while pointing to Cake Wallet for receiving. Before relying on the feature, check that both the sending and receiving wallet support it, and compare it with other privacy tools such as CoinJoin.