Silent Payments: Bitcoin's privacy upgrade goes mainstream

The DOJ arrested Samourai Wallet’s developers in April 2024 and charged them with money laundering. Wasabi Wallet shut down its coinjoin coordinator a week later, citing “regulatory fears.” For Bitcoin privacy users, this was an existential crisis. The old tools were gone.

But Bitcoin privacy didn’t die. It evolved.

Silent Payments (BIP 352) are emerging as the practical privacy solution for 2026. They solve the address reuse problem without coordinators, without mixing, and without the legal risk that killed coinjoin. One reusable address, infinite unique on-chain destinations. Just math.

And wallets are finally adopting them.

The address reuse problem

Every time you reuse a Bitcoin address, you link all payments to that address on-chain. Anyone can see your total balance, your transaction history, and where your funds came from. For static use cases like donations, tips, or merchant pages, this is a privacy disaster.

A charity publishes a donation address on their website. Every donor can see who else donated, how much, and when. The charity’s entire funding history is public. Same problem for content creators accepting tips, merchants posting payment addresses, or anyone who needs a static address.

The workaround was to generate a new address for every payment. HD wallets do this automatically. But for static addresses, you need interaction. The sender has to request a new address, or the receiver has to communicate one. That friction kills usability.

Silent Payments eliminate that friction.

How Silent Payments work

Silent Payments let you publish a single static address (starting with sp1q) that generates unique on-chain addresses for every payment. The sender doesn’t need to ask for a new address. The receiver doesn’t need to generate one. It just works.

Here’s how: The sender’s wallet takes the receiver’s public key (from the silent payment address) and the sender’s private key (from their transaction inputs). Using elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH), both parties compute a shared secret. That shared secret tweaks the receiver’s spend public key, creating a unique on-chain address.

The result? Every payment goes to a different address, but only the receiver can detect and spend those payments. No interaction. No on-chain notifications. No linkability.

The catch: The receiver has to scan the blockchain to detect payments. For each transaction, they compute the shared secret with the sender’s public keys and check if the resulting address matches any of the transaction outputs. That requires running a full node or trusting an indexing service.

Not free. Not frictionless for everyone. But for people who need static addresses, it’s a massive upgrade.

Who supports Silent Payments?

As of February 2026, wallet adoption is accelerating.

Cake Wallet was the first major wallet to implement full send and receive support. They forked electrs to add silent payment indexing, solving the scanning problem for their users. iOS and Android, both supported.

Nunchuk added silent payment support in early 2026. This is a big deal because Nunchuk focuses on multisig and collaborative custody. Silent Payments are now accessible to serious holders.

BitBox02 supports sending to silent payment addresses, but not receiving. Hardware wallets have a tougher time with the scanning requirement. Still, send-only support means BitBox users can pay anyone with a silent payment address.

Bitcoin Core is working on it. PR #28122 has been in progress since 2023. Full wallet integration is coming. When Bitcoin Core ships silent payments natively, that’s the legitimacy moment. It becomes an “official” Bitcoin feature, not just an experimental protocol.

BIP 375 was merged in 2025, specifying how to send silent payments using PSBTs (Partially Signed Bitcoin Transactions). That means hardware wallets and multisig setups can support silent payments without changing their signing logic. Expect more wallet support soon.

Why Silent Payments are regulatory-safe

The DOJ’s case against Samourai turned on coordination. Wasabi and Samourai ran coordinator services. Those coordinators facilitated transactions between users, which prosecutors argued made them money transmitters. The legal theory: mixing coins to obscure their origin is money laundering.

Silent Payments don’t have that problem.

There’s no coordinator. No mixing. No collaborative transaction. The sender creates a transaction unilaterally and sends it to the receiver. It’s a normal Bitcoin payment, just to a unique address derived from a static identifier.

Address reuse prevention is Bitcoin best practice. HD wallets have been generating fresh addresses for every transaction since BIP 32. Silent Payments automate that for receivers. There’s no stronger legal argument against silent payments than against HD wallets.

Coinjoin looked like money laundering to prosecutors. Silent Payments look like privacy hygiene.

That’s the difference between a tool that survives and one that gets developers arrested.

The limitations

Silent Payments aren’t a replacement for coinjoin. They solve address reuse. They don’t solve transaction graph analysis or amount privacy. If you send Bitcoin from a known address to a silent payment address, observers can still see where the funds came from and how much you sent.

Coinjoin broke the transaction graph by mixing your inputs with others. Silent Payments don’t do that. They’re complementary, not competitive. Best practice is layered privacy: Silent Payments for receiving, Lightning or Payjoin for sending.

The scanning requirement is also a real barrier. If you want to receive silent payments, you need to run a full node or trust an indexing service. Cake Wallet’s electrs fork is centralized. If that server goes down, Cake users can’t detect payments. BIP-158 compact block filters could enable light client scanning, but they haven’t reached mass adoption.

For now, Silent Payments are best for users who can run infrastructure or accept the trust trade-off of using an indexing service. Not for everyone. But for people who publish static addresses (charities, creators, merchants), the trade-off is worth it.

The coinjoin future

BIP 352 explicitly excludes coinjoin compatibility. The problem: coinjoin transactions have multiple signers. A malicious participant could derive the payment address, then re-broadcast the transaction with different keys. That would break the silent payment derivation. The receiver wouldn’t be able to detect the payment.

The spec notes this is “left for future work.” Not a fundamental limitation. Solvable with protocol extensions. But for now, Silent Payments work for single-party sends only.

That’s fine. Coinjoin is dead anyway. Wasabi shut down. Samourai is gone. Phoenix Wallet blocked U.S. users from coinjoin features to avoid “similar legal entanglements.” The regulatory hammer fell. The tools that required coordination didn’t survive.

Silent Payments might. Because they don’t require coordination.

What’s next

Bitcoin Core integration is the big milestone. When PR #28122 ships, every full node will have native support for silent payments. Scanning infrastructure becomes default. Wallets can rely on that. Adoption accelerates.

Merchant adoption is the next frontier. If BTCPay Server adds silent payment support, merchants can publish one address per product. No server-side address generation. No privacy leaks. That’s a real use case.

Payjoin integration would be powerful. Cake Wallet added Payjoin V2 support in May 2025. Combining Payjoin (which breaks the transaction graph) with Silent Payments (which solves address reuse) would be a serious privacy stack. The protocol work isn’t done yet, but it’s on the roadmap.

For now, Silent Payments are the privacy tool that might survive. No coordinators. No legal targets. Just a better way to receive Bitcoin without leaking your transaction history.

The DOJ killed coinjoin. But they can’t kill math.

Sources: Samourai Wallet prosecution, Wasabi Wallet shutdown, BIP 352 specification, Hiro: What Are Bitcoin Silent Payments?, Nunchuk silent payment support, Area Bitcoin: Silent Payments in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Core PR #28122, Bitcoin Optech: Silent Payments topic, ForkLog: Silent payments enhancing Bitcoin anonymity, Ruben Somsen: Silent Payments proposal, DailyCoin: Wasabi discontinues coinjoin, Cryptoprune: Payjoin V2 in Cake Wallet, Bitcoin Core Reviews: PR #28122. Last updated February 25, 2026.