What is an account?
The global state of Ethereum is made up of accounts that interact through a messaging framework. The most basic interaction is sending some value - like Magic tokens, Ethereum - the native cryptocurrency of the ethereum blockchain. Each account is identified by a 20-byte hexadecimal identifier, which is called an address - this is generated from the account's public key. There are two types of accounts:
An Ethereum account is an entity with an ether (ETH) balance that can send transactions on Ethereum. Accounts can be controlled by users or deployed as smart contracts.
- External account - an account controlled by a private key, and if you have the private key associated with that account, you can send assets from that account to other accounts.
- Contract Account - A smart contract controlled by code and deployed on the network
Both account types can:
- Receive, hold and send ETH and tokens
- Interacting with deployed smart contracts