Accounts and addresses

The Tezos ledger currently supports two types of accounts that can hold tokens (and be the destinations of transactions), identified by distinct addresses:

  • An implicit account is a non-programmable account, whose tokens are spendable and delegatable by the owner of a private key. Its address is the hash of the public key, prefixed by tz1, tz2, tz3 or mv4.

  • A smart contract is a programmable account, associated with some Michelson code. A transaction to such an address can provide data, and can fail, according to the transaction semantics. Its address is a unique hash that depends on the operation that led to its creation, prefixed by KT1.

Finally, addresses prefixed with sr1 identify Smart Rollups.

Implicit accounts

From the economic protocol’s point of view, implicit accounts are considered as a particular case of smart contracts that always succeed in receiving tokens or tickets, and do nothing else.

Transactions that are signed by the private key corresponding to the public key hash, i.e. address of the account can spend its tokens. Each prefix for addresses denote a different cryptographic signing scheme. They are briefly described below from a user point of view.

The sizes of public keys, secret keys and signatures may differ between the different schemes but addresses are always 20 bytes long.

tz1: Ed25519

Addresses that start with the tz1 prefix are hashes of Ed25519 public keys and signatures must be produced by using the EdDSA signature scheme with the Curve25519 curve. This is the default scheme of Mavkit when, e.g., generating key pairs. It is also the recommended cryptographic scheme to use because it offers better security guarantees than EcDSA and has good performance on most hardware. It may not be available in all wallets or on all dedicated chips which is why Tezos supports multiple schemes.

tz2: Secp256k1

Addresses that start with the tz2 prefix are hashes of Secp256k1 public keys and signatures must be produced by using the EcDSA signature scheme with the Secp256k1 curve. Secp256k1 is notably the cryptographic scheme used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. This means that private keys and addresses used on Bitcoin can also be used on Tezos.

tz3: P-256

Addresses that start with the tz3 prefix are hashes of P-256 public keys and signatures must be produced by using the EcDSA signature scheme with the P-256 curve, also known as Secp256r1. This is one of the curves for EcDSA recommended by NIST. It is also often the only cryptographic scheme supported by HSMs (Hardware Security Modules) of cloud providers.

mv4: BLS

Addresses that start with the mv4 prefix are hashes of BLS public keys and signatures must be produced by using the BLS signature scheme with the BLS12-381 curve. One particularity of BLS signatures is that they are aggregatable. This means that multiple signatures can be aggregated into one, and later verified as having been produced for the correct expected public keys. This allows for numerous applications like mutli-signatures schemes, multi-party key exchanges, signatures compaction, etc. BLS is notably used by Zcash and Ethereum 2.0.