Different Keys per Account explained

Account

Every Incognito Account comes with one address and four keys.

You can find your accounts by tapping Keychain at the bottom of the Home tab.

Your keys for a specific account will display when tapping the key icon of that account.

Address

Your Incognito Address is like a bank account number. Whenever someone needs to send you PRV or pTokens (both are already on the Incognito blockchain1) all they need is your Your Incognito Address to perform the transaction.

Keys

Name Function
Private Key This is the most important key. The Private Key gives access to your funds. You should not share this key with anyone. Store it safely in multiple offline places. The Private Key is your only way to regain access to your funds in case of device loss/crash/damage.
Public Key This key is used for authentication and can be shared with third-party services. For example, an app that supplies information on your Node status.
Readonly Key This key supplies reading rights. For example, with just Your Incognito Address (by use of code) people can see transactions performed with your account, but no details are revealed. When your Readonly Key is supplied, the details become available.
Validator Key This key is used by Node owners. To assign an account to a Node, the Validator key is supplied to the Node software. After that, the Node will use that account for staking and withdrawing earnings.

Note

Although (some) information can be revealed with the Public, Readonly and Validator key, only the Private key grants access to your funds. Again, keep the Private key of every account you use stored in a safe, offline place.

1: To receive coins from external blockchains (Shielding), coin specific addresses will be generated on demand. These are one-time use addresses, valid for 120 minutes.

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Does the public key follow a pattern or is it random?

Not sure what kind of pattern you are looking for, but my own public keys don’t seem to have anything in common, but length.

I’m trying to identify an address given to my bot in Telegram, and I can do that with a RegEX expression. I see that they always start with 12 and have a length of 103. Do you think that would apply to all forever?

Ah, address, you said public key.
Addresses start with 12 that is correct, and all have the same length.

Old addresses had a different format, no one should use those, so I won’t repeat the format to prevent confusion.

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can you have multiple vnodes attached to one wallet. like several nodes using the same validator key?

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No, you can’t. Each wallet has a unique validator key. And your stake is tied with that validator key. Multiple Nodes using the same validator key doesn’t generate any more benefits.

The answer is actually yes, and no.

Your wallet, is the complete app, everything it holds, from accounts to pDEX.
So, yes you can have multiple Nodes attached to one wallet, but only one Node per account. Each Node needs its own validator key.

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Does the read-only key see account data or transaction data or both?

Specifically, if I have an incognito account address and the correct read-only key, could I see their transactions?

Yes, readonly key will fill in the details of transactions.

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Is there documentation around this?

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I assume you have access to the system already since you are running the Twitter bot.

You can try this command (I use Postman to checkout commands)

{
    "id": 1,
    "jsonrpc": "1.0",
    "method": "gettransactionbyreceiver",
    "params": [
      {
        "PaymentAddress": "incognito address here",
          "ReadonlyKey": "readonly key here"
      }  
  ]
}
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Hi @Josh_Hamon,

With a read-only key, you can get information about the account such as:

  • list output coins
  • amount
  • received transactions

However, cannot deduce the serial number, that is used to get the unspent coins as well as the balance of the account.

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