Private Key

In IoTeX, the accounts Private Key is generated as a 64 random hex characters, e.g.:

90bf89cd944df5c6d8281b132783277c1760537809c534fc54dda34c4edfb4f4

and the corresponding Public Key is derived from the private key using ECDSA (secp256k1), which is exactly the same as Ethereum.

Address Construction

A IoTeX human readable address like io1nyjs526mnqcsx4twa7nptkg08eclsw5c2dywp4 can be constructed using the following steps:

1. Generate a random private key as a 64 random hex characters

2. Calculate the corresponding public key using secp256k1 elliptic curve

3. Apply keccak256 hash function to the public key, excluding the first byte: hash := keccak256(pk[1:])

4. Take the last 20 bytes of the hash as the payload: payload := hash[12:] , this is the byte representation of the address

5. Apply the bech32 encoding on the payload, and add the io1 prefix.