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Ethereum address

A 20-byte account identifier: for externally owned accounts, the last 20 bytes of the Keccak-256 hash of the 64-byte uncompressed secp256k1 public key without its 0x04 prefix, written as 0x plus 40 hex digits.
Also written asEthereum addressEOA address0x address

Private key 1 (the generator point) gives 0x7e5f4552091a69125d5dfcb7b8c2659029395bdf. Contract addresses come from the deployer and nonce (CREATE) or from a salt and init code (CREATE2), so they have no private key. EIP-55 mixed-case encoding adds a checksum through capitalization.

An address commits to a hash of the public key, so the key stays hidden until the account first signs; after that it can be recovered from any signature. Look-alike addresses that share the first and last few characters are a common scam ("address poisoning"), so compare full addresses or use names and allowlists.

Standards and references

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