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The Problem

Your Ethereum address is a glass wallet​

When you share your address to receive a payment, you're handing over your entire financial history. Your employer pays you? Now they know every token you hold, every DeFi position, every NFT purchase. A friend sends you ETH? They can see your whole balance sheet.

This is not theoretical. Block explorers and off-the-shelf analytics tools resolve an address to its full balance, token holdings, and counterparties in seconds. Share an address once and that profile follows it.

The core issue: on a public blockchain, your address is your identity. Once it is known, everything connected to it is visible to anyone, forever.

The two problems SPECTER solves​

Generic wallet vs SPECTER

Problem 1: Receiving payments destroys privacy​

Every existing stealth address system (Umbra, Fluidkey) uses classical elliptic curve cryptography (ECDH) for the privacy layer. That works against today's computers.

But stealth systems leave cryptographic data on-chain permanently: ciphertexts, public keys, announcements. This data can't be deleted.

Problem 2: Quantum computers will break classical crypto​

This is the harvest-now-decrypt-later attack:

Post-quantum cryptography

An attacker doesn't need a quantum computer today. They just need to save the data. When quantum computers are powerful enough (NIST estimates 10-15 years), they can retroactively break the privacy of every classical stealth payment ever made.

For a protocol where privacy is the whole point, that's a death sentence.

Why this matters right now​

You might think "quantum computers are far away." But consider:

  • Privacy data is permanent. On-chain ciphertexts don't expire. A payment you receive today could be deanonymized in 2035.
  • Nation-state adversaries are already stockpiling. Intelligence agencies are collecting encrypted data now for future decryption.
  • NIST has already finalized post-quantum standards. ML-KEM (FIPS 203) was standardized in August 2024. The cryptography community isn't waiting.
  • Migration takes years. The longer we wait to adopt PQ crypto, the bigger the window of vulnerable data.

What's needed​

A stealth address system that:

  1. Gives every sender a fresh, unlinkable destination for the recipient
  2. Uses post-quantum cryptography for the discovery layer so on-chain data stays private forever
  3. Works with existing wallets and chains without consensus changes
  4. Is fast enough to actually use (scanning thousands of announcements in seconds)

That's what SPECTER builds.

How SPECTER solves this

The plain-language explanation of what SPECTER does.

SPECTER vs others

Side-by-side comparison with Umbra and Fluidkey.