Ethereum Accounts

Now that we’ve covered the basics of blockchain technology, we can take a high-level view of how the Ethereum network works. We'll first look into what Ethereum accounts are and what role they play. We'll also learn how Ethereum networks authenticate users who perform network transactions.

Accounts

All operations on Ethereum are interactions between its accounts, of which there are two types:

• Externally-owned accounts (EOA): These are accounts controlled by Ethereum users.

• Smart contracts: These are accounts controlled by code deployed to Ethereum.

EOA and smart contracts have many features in common, such as the following:

• Both have an Ether balance associated with them.

• Both can receive payments in Ether and send payments to other users or smart contracts.

• Both can deploy smart contracts and interact with other smart contracts.

• Both are identified by a unique ID, called an account address.

The biggest difference between the two is that the behavior of a smart contract is controlled by its code, while the behavior of an EOA is controlled by the account owner.

Smart contracts

How are smart contracts organized? We'll look into this in more detail in the next chapter, but in a nutshell, a smart contract is somewhat similar to a class in an object-oriented language. A smart contract developer defines what variables a smart contract has and what methods allow it to query and change contract data. Once a smart contract is developed, a developer can deploy one or multiple instances of this ...