Silent Payments

Say goodbye to "send me a new address." A Silent Payment address is a single Bitcoin address — starting with sp1 — that you can post anywhere: your website, social media bio, a donation page. Every payment sent to it lands at a fresh, unique address on-chain that only you can find and spend.

Why you'd want this

A normal Bitcoin address is public the moment you share it: anyone who sees it can look up every payment it ever receives. The usual fix is handing out a fresh address for every payment — fine for one-off transfers, painful for donations, tips, or anyone who pays you repeatedly.

Silent Payments remove the tradeoff. The sender's wallet uses your sp1 address to derive a unique one-time address that only you can detect. On-chain, the payment looks like any ordinary Taproot transaction — observers can't even tell a Silent Payment happened, and unlike older reusable-address schemes (BIP47), there's no extra "notification" transaction leaking metadata.

Cake Wallet was the first wallet with with full Silent Payments support — both sending and receiving.

Sending to a Silent Payment address

Nothing to learn: paste an sp1... address into the Send screen like any other address. Your wallet handles the rest, and the recipient's privacy comes free.

Receiving with Silent Payments

1

Find your sp1 address

Tap Receive, tap the address type under the QR code, and choose Silent Payments. This address never changes — that's the point. Post it anywhere.

2

Turn on scanning

Because payments to you are hidden on-chain, your wallet has to scan for them. Open Settings → Privacy → Silent Payments and enable Set Silent Payments always scanning.

3

Let it catch up

While scanning, a small amber dot shows next to the chain chips on your home screen. If you know when your first Silent Payment arrived, use Silent Payments Scanning to scan from a specific date or block height instead of the whole chain — it's much faster.

The honest tradeoffs

Privacy this good has one cost: your wallet does the finding. Nobody else can detect your payments, so no server can do it for you.

• Scanning takes time. The wallet checks candidate transactions block by block. Scanning from your wallet's creation date (rather than from the beginning) keeps this manageable, and Scan one block lets you check a specific block instantly.
• Scanning uses battery and data while active. If you receive Silent Payments rarely, you can leave always-scanning off and enable it when you're expecting one — payments are never lost, just not visible until you scan.
• Scanning needs a tweak-capable node, and Cake Wallet will not switch yours. If the node you have selected can't serve the data scanning needs, the scan runs against the default Cake Wallet server instead — see the note below.

Learn more

For a deeper dive into how Silent Payments work under the hood, see silentpayments.xyz.