3_keys_and_addresses

Creating keys and addresses

In the Shelley era of Cardano, every stakeholder can have two sets of keys and addresses:

• Payment Keys and addresses: To send and receive transactions
• Stake Keys and addresses: To control protocol participation, create a stake pool, delegate and receive rewards.

Payment key pair

To generate a payment key pair:

cardano-cli address key-gen \
--verification-key-file payment.vkey \
--signing-key-file payment.skey

This creates two files payment.vkey (the public verification key) and payment.skey (the private signing key).

Legacy key

To generate Byron-era _payment key:

Payment key files use the following format:

{
    "type": "PaymentSigningKeyByron_ed25519_bip32",
    "description": "Payment Signing Key",
    "cborHex": "hex-here"
}

Where the hex-here is generated as 0x5880 | xprv | pub | chaincode

Stake key pair

To generate a stake key pair :

cardano-cli stake-address key-gen \
--verification-key-file stake.vkey \
--signing-key-file stake.skey

Payment address

Both verification keys (payment.vkey and stake.vkey) are used to build the address and the resulting payment address is associated with these keys.

cardano-cli address build \
--payment-verification-key-file payment.vkey \
--stake-verification-key-file stake.vkey \
--out-file payment.addr \
--mainnet

Stake address

To generate a stake address:

cardano-cli stake-address build \
--stake-verification-key-file stake.vkey \
--out-file stake.addr \
--mainnet

This address CAN'T receive payments but will receive the rewards from participating in the protocol.

Query the balance of an address

NOTE: Ensure that your node has synced to the current block height which can be checked at explorer.cardano.org. If it is not, you may see an error referring to the Byron Era.

To query the balance of an address we need a running node and the environment variable CARDANO_NODE_SOCKET_PATH set to the path of the node.socket:

cardano-cli query utxo \
--address $(cat payment.addr) \
--mainnet

                            TxHash                                 TxIx        Amount
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note--mainnet identifies the Cardano mainnet, for preproduction testnet use --testnet-magic 1 and for preview testnet use --testnet-magic 2