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I would like to send an encrypted message to an address, without knowing their public key.

If I understand ECIES correctly, in order to send an encrypted ECIES message to a party, say Bob, I need to know their secp256k1 public key. However it is not usually possible to figure out public key, at least from address alone.

So is it possible for me to perform public key encryption with a party where only ethereum address is known?

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  • As I've understood it would at least be very expensive - encryption operations are processing intensive and Ethereum is expensive for processing. But otherwise I can't answer your question I'm afraid.
    – Lauri Peltonen
    Mar 27, 2019 at 8:50
  • @LauriPeltonen I was thinking more of encrypting offchain and only uploading the encrypted message, because encrypting onchain would mean that the raw message is already being broadcasted worldwide.
    – frigen
    Mar 27, 2019 at 10:30

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No, it is not possible to perform public key encryption with a party where only ethereum address is known. But, if you somehow can get signed transaction from that particular ethereum address, you can get its public key.

Answer to this question will be of help Get public key of any ethereum account

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