Account Types

In Ethereum, we have two types of accounts. The first type is called externally owned accounts (EOAs). They consist of a private key and an address similar to a bitcoin key pair. EOAs are controlled by users as we know it from bitcoin. If an EOA wants to send a transaction, it signs it with his private key.

The second type are smart contracts. They consist only of an address, code, and storage. In contrast to EOAs, they don’t have a private key (the private key is unknown). Smart contracts are small scripts that are executed by the miners and full nodes. In order to execute a smart contract, an EOA has to send a transaction to it.