Identity on the Ethereum Blockchain
Learn to distinguish between Externally-Owned Accounts (EOA) and contract accounts on the Ethereum blockchain, and learn about identity verification with tokens.
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Two types of accounts on Ethereum
The Ethereum blockchain records all Ethereum accounts and their balances. These accounts can send transactions on the Ethereum network.
Ethereum accounts can either be user-controlled or deployed as smart contracts:
User-controlled accounts, known as Externally-Owned Accounts (EOA), are controlled by a human with private keys.
On the other hand, smart contracts are deployed to the network and controlled by their Solidity source code. However, they can allow ownership by an EOA who would have the equivalent of admin privileges.
Both EOA and contract accounts have the ability to send, receive, and hold ETH and tokens, as well as interact with deployed smart contracts. However, there are key differences between EOA and contract accounts. Creating an EOA costs nothing, whereas deploying a contract, thus creating a contract account, has a cost because it uses network storage.
Moreover, only EOA can initiate transactions. Transactions between EOA can only consist in sending ETH or tokens. Transactions from an EOA to a contract account trigger Solidity code, which can execute many different actions, such as transferring tokens, calling a ...