The problem Private Wallet and Privacy solves

Ethereum is a fully public ledger — every transaction, balance, and wallet address is permanently visible to anyone. Once a wallet is linked to a person's identity even once, their entire financial history (salary, donations, business payments) is exposed forever. This is a major barrier to using Ethereum for everyday, business, or sensitive payments.

BEARS solves this by letting users send and receive ETH through one-time stealth addresses (ERC-5564) instead of their real wallet address. The sender generates a fresh, one-time address tied to the recipient's public stealth meta-address; on-chain, it looks like a payment to a random new address with no visible link to the recipient. The transaction remains fully valid and verifiable by the network — blockchain's core trust guarantees are untouched — but no outside observer, chain analyst, or advertiser can trace the payment back to the recipient's identity or spending history.

People can use BEARS to receive salaries, donations, or business payments privately, without exposing their full financial history to anyone who looks up their wallet address.

Challenges we ran into

We started this hackathon as complete beginners to blockchain development, with no prior Solidity experience. Our biggest early challenge was deciding how to implement stealth addresses without deep cryptography knowledge — we initially considered writing our own privacy contract from scratch, which would have been unrealistic in the timeframe.

We solved this by discovering and integrating the canonical, already-deployed ERC-5564 Announcer and ERC-6538 Registry contracts on Sepolia, along with the official @scopelift/stealth-address-sdk. This let us focus our limited time on correctly integrating a proven, audited standard rather than reinventing cryptographic primitives.

On the frontend, we hit a bug where our "Disconnect Wallet" button only appeared on the home page and disappeared when navigating to other screens, due to the header being duplicated across pages without the button included everywhere. We traced this to the page-routing logic and fixed it by adding the disconnect handler consistently across all page views.

We also ran into a payment-scanning issue where the app initially failed to detect real stealth payments due to block-range and RPC timing issues, which we resolved by adjusting the announcement scanner's block range logic.

As a 3-person team of blockchain beginners, coordinating git workflows, environment setup, and debugging Windows-specific PowerShell issues alongside the actual privacy tech was itself a real challenge — but it taught all three of us practical, end-to-end Web3 development in under a week.