performance blockchain protocol
Stealth XST is the Holy Grail of Crypto: a fast, feeless, private and scalable digital currency. Second to none.
Stealth was created on a dedicated blockchain in 2014 and is currently one of the most technically advanced cryptocurrencies in the market.
Stealth's economic-driven consensus mechanism is called Junaeth — the world's first private high performance blockchain protocol, setting a new standard in the blockchain industry. It went live on mainnet in May 2021.
Junaeth represents a consensus technology that improves upon the EOS and Ethereum protocols. It has been developed to support smart contracts, sidechains, on-chain governance, and blockchain oracles.
Fast transactions are fundamental to the usability of any payment system. Stealth's 5-second blocks significantly reduce problems with online payments and are critical to point-of-sale usability.
Block validators are permanently bonded by irreversibly converting XST into StealthNodes. Because there is a finite, known number of StealthNodes, Junaeth organizes block signers into a queue — each with a small window per round. This ensures blocks are signed every 5 seconds.
Block time comparison: BTC 10 min · ETH 10–20 sec · XST 5 sec
Fees always fluctuate and are unpredictable — making it impossible to build sustainable payment systems. Ethereum fees fluctuate so fast that transactions get dropped even when fees exceed the recommendation.
Stealth uses Proof of Work for feeless transactions. The sender's computer does a calculation of known difficulty and includes the results in the spending transaction — a proven anti-spam measure that enhances user experience.
Average fee comparison: BTC $4.67 · ETH $2.15 · XST $0.00
Stealth tackles both cryptographic privacy and massive scalability by splitting the problem via a fused ledger. UTXO for privacy (like travelers' cheques that can be cryptographically shuffled), and state/account-based for scalability (queue-based block signing, no storage overhead for rewards).
Bitcoin's competition-based block signing is massively inefficient. Stealth's scheduled approach eliminates this waste entirely — delivering throughput competitive with established payment systems.
Most cryptocurrencies are pseudonymous at best — every transaction is permanently visible on a public ledger. Stealth offers something categorically different: a dedicated private sidechain where sender, receiver, and amount are hidden by mathematics, not policy.
stealthPRIVATE uses zk-SNARKs — the same cryptographic primitive behind Zcash — but as a fully dedicated chain. There is no transparent fallback, no opt-in privacy. Every transaction on stealthPRIVATE is shielded by design, always.
Stealth/XST is the fastest cryptographically private digital currency. With blazing fast 5-second blocks, Junaeth is a game-changer and offers what state-of-the-art payment systems of the future require: a fast, feeless, private and scalable crypto. Decentralization and transaction finality are as important as being fast and feeless. Most high performance cryptocurrencies sacrifice decentralization for scalability — some have only 10 validators to sign blocks. Stealth is currently the only BTC descendant in the market to offer true feeless transactions, paving the way for blockchain adoption.
Feeless is the only way for blockchain adoption. Feeless transactions facilitate microtransactions valued at fractions of a cent — enabling streaming payments, per-minute billing, and voting systems where ballots transfer minimum transaction size (currently $0.0005). With feeless, ballot values can be fully reclaimed.
- Supports multisignature transactions
- Supports data-carrying transactions (layer-two applications)
- Enables cryptographic privacy at the protocol level
An early layer-two example is Omnicoin (formerly Mastercoin) — the application in which USDT was first implemented.
A dream come true for custodial applications that require multisig. Nano (prior feeless standard) cannot offer this. EOS can approximate it via smart contracts, but requires owning RAM and vested EOS — eliminating the feeless advantage. Smart contracts can also be changed, so users can never fully trust their multisig properties.
Nano offers only account-to-account transfers. EOS requires excessive overhead. Stealth is the only protocol with native feeless multisig.
Feeless transactions use "feework outputs" — unspendable UTXOs included alongside spendable UTXOs as a fee substitute. This makes Stealth uniquely fee-optional: users freely choose between feeless and paid transactions.
Feeless transactions carry feework expiration conditions to limit abuse. During periods of high use or network attack, paid transactions receive processing priority.
There is a finite and known number of StealthNodes — permanently bonded block validators with significant financial stake in the platform. Junaeth organizes them into a signing queue, each with a small window per round to validate a block.
This queue, combined with incentives for quality hardware, ensures a block every 5 seconds — making XST transactions nearly instant and delivering an exceptional user experience.
Current blocksize allows 917 TPS feeless on a single CPU core. Block size can be increased to 9,362+ TPS. A validator using multiple CPU cores can verify feeless transactions concurrently — a 16-core CPU could verify ~150,000 TPS via parallel processing.
Stealth's novel network timekeeping mechanism makes time-synchrony an emergent property governed by game theory. This enables the network to expunge malicious DoS transactions after only a few seconds. Stealth has the most spam-resistant feeless protocol yet invented.
Users send XST from stealthCORE to the private sidechain stealthPRIVATE, converting to XSS (StealthSend) with full cryptographic privacy via zk-SNARKs — hiding sender, receiver, and amount. Coins can be converted back to XST at any time.
stealthCORE can be hosted independently of stealthPRIVATE, keeping all private transactions off the main chain — simplifying regulatory compliance for exchanges and custodial processors.
- Smaller transactions than Monero → more efficient scaling
- Fast validation → validators process far more transactions
- Based on Zerocash — hides sender, receiver, and amount completely
The world's first privately secured high-performance consensus protocol. Junaeth powers Stealth's 5-second feeless blocks through economically-driven StealthNode validators — combining decentralization, finality, and spam resistance in a single elegant design.
Economic Consensus5s BlocksFeelessLive since May 2021
Stealth Junaeth block validators purchase blockchain assets known as StealthNodes that carry block signing rights. Because all validation rights are purchased rather than granted by "benevolent" founders who attained coins from a premine, Junaeth is free from control by any central entity — which often serves its own ends rather than the value or health of the blockchain.
Junaeth has a novel asynchronous network clock that allows for network latency, disruptions, and multithreaded processing of network events. Other approaches rely on strict coordination, resulting in fragile designs where minor consensus issues can freeze entire blockchains. Junaeth's asynchronous clock is robust to all consensus issues that create forks.
For each block a StealthNode produces, it earns XST. Earnings per block increase as a StealthNode signs more blocks — purely based on performance. The result is a blockchain meritocracy. Validators don't need to waste resources inflating their status with a centralized cabal of founders. Only consistent block production matters.
Stealth uses a fused ledger: a Bitcoin-type UTXO ledger for transfers, and an account-based ledger for StealthNode block rewards. This fusion allows efficiencies of account-based ledgers for core validation while enabling transaction types exclusive to UTXO ledgers — most importantly, cryptographically private transfers.
StealthNodes are the block validators for Junaeth. Blockchain validators gain rights through purely economic mechanisms and are rewarded based solely on quantifiable performance. The Stealth network currently consists of 100 StealthNodes that ensure consistent blocktimes averaging 5 seconds.
StealthNodes are purchased from the blockchain by effectively burning the cost — the XST spent disappears entirely from the money supply. In 2021 parlance, each StealthNode is an NFT that gives its owner block validation and block reward rights.
Junaeth's stake-based protocol obviates the political mess of so-called "delegated" systems where founders and insiders often have a corrupting influence on blockchain performance, governance, and development. Along with being a blazing fast protocol, Junaeth supports full cryptographic privacy, sidechains, oracles, and on-chain governance — making it a model for future high performance blockchains.
The blockchain trilemma, framed by Vitalik Buterin, states that a blockchain can only optimise for two of three properties simultaneously. Every major chain makes this trade-off — and it shows.
Most high-performance chains achieve scalability by centralising the validator set — Solana relies on a relatively small set of high-spec validators. Speed comes at the cost of decentralisation and, ultimately, security.
Junaeth's economic validator selection — where rights are purchased and rewards are purely merit-based — creates a stable, self-regulating validator set of 100 StealthNodes. No voting. No politics. No foundation deciding who validates. The economics do the work.
The result is a chain that delivers Bitcoin-grade security and decentralisation principles alongside 5-second blocks, 917 TPS base throughput, and a feeless transaction model — all three corners of the trilemma addressed simultaneously.
A private sidechain fully integrated with stealthCORE. Users convert XST to XSS (StealthSend) — hiding sender, receiver, and amount via zk-SNARKs. Coins can be converted back to XST at any time. stealthCORE can be hosted independently, simplifying regulatory compliance for exchanges.
zk-SNARKsFeelessPrivate
The deposit record (CBridgeDeposit) stores: the Core chain txid (locking transaction), amount locked, multisig P2SH address, staker keys (2-of-3 quorum), and a spent flag.
It does not store the sender address or the receiver shielded address. The XSS address is only used at the moment of minting to create the shielded note — it is never persisted. This is intentional and by design for privacy.
When withdrawing, the destination XST address is simply a parameter you provide. You can withdraw to any XST address — it does not have to be the original sender. There is zero linkage enforced.
You can also withdraw any amount up to the value of an available deposit UTXO. The system finds the first unspent deposit UTXO that covers your requested amount and consumes it.
There is no per-user or per-deposit linkage. The bridge tracks nTotalMinted (incremented on deposit) and nTotalBurned (incremented on withdrawal). Net supply = minted − burned.
Example: send 100 transactions of 1,000 XST each (100k total), then withdraw a single transaction of 50k XSS back to Core — to any XST address you specify. The system burns 50k XSS from your shielded wallet and sends 50k XST to the address you specified.
Shielded-to-shielded transfers are fully implemented. A spend bundle is created with one spend action (consuming your note), one output action (to the recipient shielded address), one change output (back to you if needed), and a Halo 2 zk-SNARK proof.
You can freely move funds within stealthPRIVATE: B → C, C → D, split, merge — all fully shielded. Amounts, senders, and receivers are hidden at every step.
Deposits don't record sender or receiver. Withdrawals don't reference original deposits by user — only pool consumption. Shielded transactions are fully private via Orchard zk-SNARKs / Halo 2.
The pool-based design mitigates any timing/amount correlation concerns (e.g. deposit 1,000 → immediately withdraw 1,000) — withdrawals do not need to match deposit amounts or addresses.
Payment Disclosure will allow a sender to selectively prove a specific payment using their Outgoing Viewing Key (OVK), without revealing full transaction history. It will reveal only recipient address, amount, and memo — for one specific note only.
Use cases: merchant verification, dispute resolution, audit / compliance, refund processing. Selective transparency without breaking global privacy. Status: planned — not yet implemented.
The sidechain has no rich list, no visible transactions, and no searchable explorer — by design. The rich list (getrichlist) only tracks transparent addresses on stealthCORE. Shielded transactions cannot be viewed, searched, or listed.
Public data on the shielded chain is limited to: block height, net supply, tree size, and nullifier count. No transaction-level explorer exists — or can exist — for the shielded chain.
A zero-knowledge proof is a cryptographic method that lets one party prove a statement is true to another party — without revealing any information beyond the truth of the statement itself. In a blockchain context: a sender can prove a transaction is valid, correctly authorized, and free of double-spending — without revealing who sent it, who received it, or how much was moved.
zk-SNARK stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Argument of Knowledge. "Succinct" means the proof is tiny — just a few hundred bytes — and fast to verify regardless of how complex the underlying computation was. "Non-interactive" means no back-and-forth challenge is needed between prover and verifier. The proof is self-contained.
Every other form of blockchain privacy is a tradeoff: mixing obscures but doesn't guarantee, ring signatures hide in a crowd but grow with transaction count, confidential transactions hide amounts but not participants. zk-SNARKs offer something categorically different — cryptographic certainty. Not probabilistic privacy. Not privacy by obscurity. Mathematical proof that nothing was revealed.
In stealthPRIVATE, funds exist as encrypted "notes" — commitments stored on-chain that are mathematically binding but reveal nothing. When you spend a note, you produce a zk-SNARK proof that you own it and a nullifier that marks it consumed — without ever revealing which note it was. A global nullifier set prevents double-spending with no loss of privacy.
The result: an observer watching the chain sees only that a shielded transaction occurred. Sender, receiver, and amount are hidden not by policy or obfuscation — but because they are mathematically absent from the public record.
Most zk-SNARK implementations — Zcash included — bolt privacy onto a UTXO chain as an optional feature, meaning shielded and transparent pools coexist and most transactions remain visible. stealthPRIVATE is a dedicated private sidechain: every transaction inside it is shielded by design. There is no transparent fallback, no opt-in privacy — the entire chain operates under zk-SNARK guarantees, always.
Available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Supports feeless transactions, multisignature accounts, BIP39, and transaction labels (memos) for easy tracking of remittances.
The StealthSend Mobile App is available for iOS and Android. Both StealthSend Mobile and Desktop are light wallets, ready to use within seconds.
As AI agents become autonomous actors on the internet — buying data, accessing APIs, paying for compute, hiring other agents — they need a payment layer that works the same way they do: instantly, cheaply, privately, and without human intervention.
Traditional payment rails were designed for humans. Credit cards require accounts. Bank transfers take days. Even most crypto transactions carry fees that make micropayments economically unviable. Machine-to-machine payments demand something fundamentally different — and Stealth was built for exactly this.
Stealth's feeless, fast (5s blocks), and privacy-preserving architecture makes it a strong candidate for x402-style micropayments. The whole value proposition of x402 falls apart if every payment has a $2 fee attached. Stealth's feeless protocol and sub-second finality perception is a natural fit.
x402 is an open payment protocol built on top of HTTP, leveraging the long-dormant 402 Payment Required HTTP status code. Originally reserved in 1991 "for future use", it was never implemented — until now.
The concept is elegantly simple: a server responds with a 402 status when content or a service requires payment. The client — an AI agent, app, or wallet — pays automatically using crypto. Access is granted. No accounts. No signups. No intermediaries.
AI agents autonomously pay for LLM inference, data lookups, translation services, and specialized tools — per request, in real time, without pre-funding accounts or managing subscriptions.
Smart devices pay for bandwidth, sensor data, or compute resources from neighboring nodes — creating autonomous microeconomies between physical devices with no human in the loop.
Researchers, agents, and services pay for individual database queries, real-time feeds, or proprietary datasets — per row, per result, per second — without committing to subscriptions.
Video, audio, compute, and bandwidth billed by the second or millisecond. Traditional payment rails make this impossible — transaction fees would dwarf the actual payment. Feeless changes the math entirely.
x402 and M2M payments in general have a hard requirement: the payment layer must not add friction. A $2 fee on a $0.001 API call makes the entire model economically absurd. Speed matters too — an AI agent waiting 10 minutes for block confirmation is a broken agent. And privacy is non-negotiable when autonomous systems are transacting sensitive data on behalf of users.
Stealth satisfies all three conditions simultaneously — something no other blockchain currently offers.
An AI agent making 10,000 micro-payments per day at $0.001 each is transacting $10/day in value. On a fee-based chain, those same transactions could cost $20,000/day in gas. The model collapses entirely.
Stealth's feeless protocol — protected by memory-hard feework rather than fees — makes M2M micropayments economically viable at any scale. The smallest XST transaction costs exactly $0.00 in fees.
Bitcoin's 10-minute blocks and Ethereum's ~12-second blocks are designed around human patience. An autonomous agent waiting minutes for payment confirmation is blocked — unable to proceed, unable to serve users.
Stealth's 5-second blocks and light wallet architecture mean payments are confirmed and usable within seconds. Agents can operate in near real-time, with payment latency that matches API response times.
When an AI agent pays for sensitive data — medical records, proprietary research, user behavior data — broadcasting that transaction publicly exposes what the agent is doing, for whom, and how often.
stealthPRIVATE's zk-SNARK sidechain enables fully private M2M transactions. Sender, receiver, and amount are hidden — giving agents the same confidentiality that human actors expect from private financial transactions.
Ethereum's account-based model creates sequential bottlenecks — one unconfirmed transaction blocks all subsequent ones from the same address. For an agent firing hundreds of payments per second, this is a critical limitation.
Stealth's UTXO model — inherited from Bitcoin — allows fully parallel transaction processing. Multiple agents sharing a wallet can all pay simultaneously with no ordering conflicts.
stealthCORE is a transparent UTXO chain — every unspent output persists in the ledger until it is explicitly consumed. At human transaction frequency this is fine. At machine frequency — thousands of micropayments per hour between agents — it creates a structural problem: UTXO dust.
stealthPRIVATE's shielded note model works differently. Each payment consumes an existing note and creates new ones in its place. There is no accumulating backlog of small unspent outputs. The chain stays clean regardless of throughput, and agents never face a situation where the cost of consolidating dust exceeds the value of the outputs themselves.
On a transparent UTXO chain, high-frequency micropayments produce a growing set of small outputs — dust — that accumulates in wallets and bloats the global UTXO set. Eventually these outputs cost more in computational overhead to spend than they are worth.
stealthPRIVATE eliminates this entirely. A spend action consumes the input note and creates fresh output notes. An agent can receive 10,000 micropayments and spend them in a single consolidated action with no dust penalty and no ledger bloat.
An AI agent operating on a transparent chain broadcasts its entire payment graph publicly — which services it uses, how often, how much it pays, and who it pays. This exposes the agent's underlying task, its resource dependencies, and potentially the strategy of the operator behind it.
On stealthPRIVATE, all of this is cryptographically hidden. Agent-to-agent payments reveal nothing — no counterparty, no amount, no frequency. Competitors, counterparties, and observers see only that a shielded transaction occurred.
Because stealthPRIVATE operates as a pool — deposits add to a shared UTXO pool, withdrawals consume from it — agents can accumulate thousands of micropayments internally and bridge back to stealthCORE in a single bulk withdrawal, to any XST address, at any time.
This decouples settlement frequency from payment frequency. An agent making 50,000 micropayments per day can settle once, without any per-payment overhead on the transparent chain and without any on-chain linkage between individual payments and the final withdrawal.
On stealthCORE, every unspent output adds a permanent entry to the global UTXO set until it is spent. Under high-frequency M2M load, this set grows rapidly and adds validation overhead for all nodes.
stealthPRIVATE's nullifier set grows on spend — not on receipt. Unspent notes exist only inside wallets, not in a global set. The on-chain footprint of receiving 10,000 payments is zero until those notes are spent. This is structurally better for high-throughput agent workloads.
This is a differentiator that nobody else in the space can claim — feeless and private and dust-free micropayments. Stealth is one of a kind.