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Accounts

Account is the basic identity of an agent on the blockchain. An account is identified by its address.

In Parallelchain Mainnet, accounts are divided into two types:

  • Externally Owned Accounts (EOA): The address of an EOA is the public key of the keypair that is compatible with ed25519-dalek.
  • Contract Accounts: A contract account is created from contract deployment. The address is the SHA256 hash of the concatenation of a contract's bytecode and the nonce of the EOA that deploys the contract.

Elements inside an account include:

  • Nonce: The number of transactions made to the blockchain under this account.
  • Balance: The balance of the account.

The followings are elements that only apply to Contract Accounts:

  • Contract Code: The binary of the smart contract that was deployed to the blockchain (applies to Contract Accounts).
  • CBI Version: The version of the Contract Binary Interface.
  • Storage Hash: The 32-byte SHA256 root hash of its Storage Trie. This is empty for an External.

How Account Works

You can create EOA account by ed25519-dalek key generation algorithm. The account is composed of a 32-byte public key and a 32-byte private key. This public key is the Address which can be known to others. While your private key, which is used for signing transactions, MUST be kept in secret.

Address is usually displayed in Base64url format in ParallelChain Mainnet ecosystem. Here is an example:

Tc0bU2oS0A0_GrjPKsDLSyVa3gc7PvzwWIAGRk-_SmA

If you want to transfer XPLL to Alice's account, first you need to know her address. Then, you create a transaction with Alice's address as recipient, and sign it by using your private key. The Balance of your and Alice's account will be updated when this signed transaction is made to blockchain successfully. The Nonce of your account will be increased by 1.

On the other hand, a Contract Account is not made up of cryptographic keys. Its address is a 32-byte hash. It is not able to sign a transaction. But similar to EOA, it has its own balance, and can receive XPLL from other accounts. See Smart Contract for details.

Note

The type of account cannot be distinguished from each other just by looking at the address format.

See also:

Network Account

A Network Account is a single identified network-wide account that maintains the state of ParallelChain Mainnet. The purpose of this state is to implement the staking related protocol. This account is not associated with Ed25519 material. The network-significant data that the Network Account stores are composed of various fields:

  • Previous Validator Set: The set of pools that form the validator set in the previous epoch. The stake in this validator set is locked until the next epoch.
  • Current Validator Set: The set of pools that form the validator set in the current epoch.
  • Next Validator Set: The limited-size pools with the largest powers. These will become the validator set in the next epoch.
  • Pools: The set of pools that are accepting stakes and currently competing to become part of the next validator set.
  • Deposits: The locked balance used to determine the amount of stake that can be contributed to a pool.
  • Current Epoch: The current epoch number.