Addresses

Client-side

Account and contract addresses are Base58-check encoded strings that look like this:

AmQA7dHJFiA4mXXxTV5sAniLpxMrankdW4Cow3ykj1UM5G14QKL5

• Technical explanation of Base58-check encoding

The prefix used for encoding Aergo addresses in base58-check is 0x42.

Internal

Internally (in the server and over the wire, i.e. in GRPC requests) addresses are byte arrays with a length of 33. They represent the compressed public key of an account.

• Technical explanation of public keys

In the case of smart contracts, the address is generated from a hash of the creator’s account and the creating transaction’s nonce, prefixed with the byte 0x0C to arrive at a compatible length of 33 bytes. As a developer, you don’t have to worry about this: smart contract addresses can be used just the same as account addresses.