CAIP-76: Account Address for the Hedera namespace

Simple Summary

This document is about the details of the Hedera account address for CAIP-10.

Abstract

In CAIP-10 a general account address scheme is defined. The definitions of Hedera Address do not fit neatly into that specification so an alternate address format is defined for Hedera

Motivation

See CAIP-10.

Specification

The account_id and chain_id from CAIP-10 will remain unchanged. The address will be the Hedera account ID as a string.

Syntax

The account_id is a case-sensitive string in the form

account_id:        chain_id + ":" + account_address + checksum{0,1}
chain_id:          [:-a-zA-Z0-9]{5,41}
account_address:   [0-9]{1,19} + "." + [0-9]{1,19} + "." + [0-9]{1,19}
checksum:          "-" + [a-z]{5}

Semantics

The chain_id is specified by the CAIP-2 which describes the blockchain id. The account_address is the realm, shard, and account id, where each is separated by a dot (.) and each number is a non-negative signed 64-bit integer.

The optional checksum is described in HIP-15. Addresses with or without checksum are valid. Intermediaries have no duty to validate the validity of the checksum.

Rationale

The account address maps directly to common Hedera usage.

Test Cases

This is a list of manually composed examples

# Devnet funding account
hedera:devnet:0.0.98

# Mainnet treasury
hedera:mainnet:0.0.2

# Previewnet app propreties account
hedera:previewnet:0.0.121

# Mainnet account with checksum
hedera:mainnet:0.0.123-vfmkw

# Largest possible testnet account
hedera:testnet:9223372036854775807.9223372036854775807.9223372036854775807

Backwards Compatibility

CAIP currently limits account_address to alphanumerics in the regular expression definition. If that definition were to include the dot (.) and dash(‘-‘) then this definition would be a subset of that definition, including length restrictions in most reasonable cases. Since the checksum is optional in pathological account numbering scenarios it may need to be dropped. It is not expected that we will see this event in normal usage.

Links

• CAIP-10 Account ID Specification
• CAIP-75 Blockchain Reference for the Hedera namespace
• HIP-15 Address Checksum
• HIP-30 CAIP Identifiers for the Hedera Network

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

Citation

Please cite this document as:

Danno Ferrin, "CAIP-76: Account Address for the Hedera namespace," Chain Agnostic Improvement Proposals, no. 76, November 2021. [Online serial]. Available: https://github.com/ChainAgnostic/CAIPs/blob/master/CAIPs/caip-76.md