Account Types

Last Updated on 3. May 2023 by Martin Schuster

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.