Skip to main content

AddressProtocol

AddressProtocol

protocol AddressProtocol : AnyObject, Sendable

Unique identifier for an Account on the IOTA blockchain.

An Address is a 32-byte pseudonymous identifier used to uniquely identify an account and asset-ownership on the IOTA blockchain. Often, human-readable addresses are encoded in hexadecimal with a 0x prefix. For example, this is a valid IOTA address: 0x02a212de6a9dfa3a69e22387acfbafbb1a9e591bd9d636e7895dcfc8de05f331.

Deriving an Address

Addresses are cryptographically derived from a number of user account authenticators, the simplest of which is an Ed25519PublicKey.

Deriving an address consists of the Blake2b256 hash of the sequence of bytes of its corresponding authenticator, prefixed with a domain-separator (except ed25519, for compatibility reasons). For each other authenticator, this domain-separator is the single byte-value of its SignatureScheme flag. E.g. hash(signature schema flag || authenticator bytes).

Each authenticator has a method for deriving its Address as well as documentation for the specifics of how the derivation is done. See Ed25519PublicKey::derive_address for an example.

Relationship to ObjectIds

ObjectIds and Addresses share the same 32-byte addressable space but are derived leveraging different domain-separator values to ensure that, cryptographically, there won't be any overlap, e.g. there can't be a valid Object who's ObjectId is equal to that of the Address of a user account.

BCS

An Address's BCS serialized form is defined by the following:

address = 32OCTET