Introduction

An Account uniquely identifies any entity actively participating in the IoTeX network, that can be a user, a device, an enterprise, or even software on the blockchain itself (a so-called smart contract). Each IoTeX account has a private key and a corresponding public key associated with it.

Account Address

As with other blockchain networks, following a specific set of transformations, the public key is usually transformed into a human-readable string, which is referred to as the address of the account,

IoTeX specifies an address format made of 41 characters, starting by io1... such that a typical address in the IoTeX blockchain looks like the one below:

io1z3lgqhy93pqqnyvsugyd0gz2wne2p2kglr5cdd

which was obtained from the following public key:

0700898c9dcae0279c88318003ee210e1ee2514121d292d2f03739498ce95f4e

Nonetheless, if you convert that public key using the Ethereum address format specification, you will get the following Ethereum address representation:

0x147e805c858840099190e208d7A04A74F2A0AAC8

Both the IoTeX address and the Ethereum address representations above refer to the same blockchain account because they represent the same public key. Check out the section Address Conversion to learn more about IoTeX and Ethereum address representations.

Address types

IoTeX is an Ethereum-compatible smart contract platform, so in the same way as Ethereum two types of accounts are defined:

Externally owned accounts: have a known private key associated with them (typically owned by people, enterprises, or IoT devices) and can initiate actions such as token transfers or contract calls

Smart contract accounts: have no known private key associated, hence they cannot initiate actions, but they have "code" associated with them. The code of a smart-contract account is run each time a "contract call" action is sent to the smart-contract address by either an externally owned account or another smart contract.

Learn more about smart-contract accounts in the official Ethereum documentation:

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