The 17th May 2018, at the height of the block 540,000 of the DeepOnion Blockchain, the DeepProtocol also known as Stealth Address feature has been successfully activated through hard fork. Note that the 1.7.1 DeepOnion wallet version is mandatory in order to continue using the DeepOnion blockchain in consequence of this fork.
DeepOnion wallets were supporting Stealth Address since the 1.6 wallet version released in March and the first ever Hard Fork of the DeepOnion blockchain happened at the beginning of the month of April at the height of the block 460,000, unfortunately for the $Onion fans, holders and community members the complex technology required much more testing and hard work from the developer team than previously expected before going live.
Stealth addresses are one of the multiple privacy/anonymous layers planned on the natively TOR integrated cryptocurrency DeepOnion. TOR, the base privacy layer of DeepOnion is a well-known anonymizing network which will hide your IP address from other DeepOnion nodes preventing among other things hackers from identifying your computer. This stealth address feature allows users to create a one time address which cannot traced back to their public wallet addresses or in other words, a stealth address allows a payment recipient to hide his real address, each time he receives a payment on his stealth address a new standard address is generated to receive the Onions anonymously. Currently the most anticipated privacy layer is the very innovative and complex DeepSend feature which is an improved multi-ring signature technology but shouldn't be ready before months.
If you want to learn more about DeepOnion stealth addresses, you can check this official DeepOnion tutorial : https://deeponion.org/community/threads/deeponion-stealth-addresses-tutorial.37535/
Kucoin has disabled $Onions deposits and withdrawals during 24 hours between the 15th and 16th may in order to upgrade its wallet at the last minute. The Onion price hasn't been noticeably affected by this addition yet even though it shows great resilience in comparison to the rest of altcoins but we expect to see this feature being priced in as soon as crypto markets regain confidence. $Onion is currently trading at around 23150 satoshis ($1.92), slightly above its 22000 support.
DeepOnion is definitely still in the race to become one of the most successful privacy coin of 2018 !