Account

An account is a key pair (private and public key) associated with a mutable state stored on the blockchain. In other words, you have a deposit box, which only you can modify with your private key.

Think of an account as container for assets. It can be used to hold XYM or other mosaics, whether they are tokens or specialized assets.

Moreover, Symbol accounts can also represent non-fungible assets that must be unique and updatable: a package to be shipped, a house deed, or a document to be notarized.

Properties

Accounts have the following properties.

Private key

A private key is a secret number that allows an account to announce transactions. Anyone with access to the private key ultimately has control over the account and its assets.

Note

The private key must be kept secret. Make sure your private key is backed up safely somewhere offline.

Public key

The public key is used to verify the account’s signatures. It is stored on the blockchain with the first-issued transaction. An account which has not issued any transaction has its public key field empty.

Address

Each account has a unique address derived from the public key. Normally, the address is shared instead of the public key because it is shorter and gathers information about the network.

Balance

The balance is the amount of different mosaics units owned by the account.

Importance

The importance score determines the probability of an account to harvest the next block in case the account has harvesting turned on and all other accounts are harvesting too.

Multisig Account

Accounts become truly smart when configured with special rules—directly on the blockchain—that define how they relate and control each other, as well as how their contents can be updated and transferred.

One crucial type of rule is multisig control that allows ownership of account-based assets to be shared in a variety of ways between multiple parties.

Restrictions

Accounts may configure a set of smart rules to block announcing or receiving transactions given a series of restrictions.

HD Wallets

An HD Wallet, or Hierarchical Deterministic Wallet, enables the generation of multiple accounts from a single binary seed. The seed is encoded as a mnemonic passphrase - a group of 24 human-readable words - using elliptic curve mathematics.

Symbol supports multi-account hierarchy on the client-side. The NIP-6 defines the protocol to create HD Wallets on Symbol.

To generate new HD Wallets, use the library symbol-hd-wallets.

Guides

Continue: Mosaics.