Silent Payments (BIP-352) Wallet Support: Who Can Send & Privately Receive in 2026

Silent Payments (BIP-352) fix one of Bitcoin’s oldest privacy leaks: address reuse. You publish a single static address that starts with sp1, and every payer derives a unique, unlinkable on-chain address for you without any interaction — no fresh address to hand out, nothing tying your payments together on-chain. It’s a genuine leap. But there’s an asymmetry that catches people out: sending to an sp1 address is easy and widely supported, while privately receiving is hard, rare, and where all the interesting engineering (and the privacy trade-offs) live. This matrix separates the two honestly across 18 wallets and libraries.

Send is solved; receive is the frontier

A receiver can’t just watch an address for incoming payments — with Silent Payments, each payment lands on a fresh Taproot output derived from a shared secret between your keys and the sender’s, so finding your own money means checking essentially every eligible Taproot output in every block. A full node with an index shrugs at this; a phone can’t. So light wallets download precomputed “tweak” data (roughly 100 kB per block) from an indexing server and do the final ownership math locally. The server never learns which coins are yours — but it does see your IP address and query pattern. That’s the whole privacy question for mobile Silent Payments in one sentence: who runs your indexer, and can you self-host it? On desktop, Sparrow lets you point at your own server or reach a public one over Tor; on mobile, Cake and Nunchuk work today but through their operators’ indexers by default. Bitcoin Core, which would give zero-leak full-node receiving, still ships nothing — the wallet PRs are open but unreleased.

What to actually use

For a privacy-first user in 2026 the honest recommendation is Sparrow 2.5.0+ on desktop, pointed at your own SP-capable Electrum server — real send and receive, with nothing about your scanning leaking to anyone. On mobile, Cake Wallet and Nunchuk give working send-and-receive if you accept the default-indexer exposure or self-host a BlindBit oracle, and Dana Wallet is purpose-built for receiving donations. Keep meaningful funds away from the explicit proof-of-concept wallets. Silent Payments pair naturally with the rest of a sovereign setup: see how wallets score on the broader picture in the wallet sovereignty matrix, plan who inherits those keys with the inheritance planner, and read the protocol itself in the Bitcoin BIPs reference. Privacy at the receiving end is finally real — just make sure you’re the one holding the indexer.