In Hedera Services 0.21 we are pleased to announce support for ECDSA(secp256k1) keys and auto-account creation.
The Ethereum network makes heavy use of ECDSA cryptography with the secp256k1 curve, and by supporting these keys we ease the developer experience of migrating a dApp to Hedera. Anywhere a Ed25519 key can be used in the Hedera API, it is now possible to substitute a ECDSA(secp256k1) key.
Auto-account creation lets a new user receive ℏ via a CryptoTransfer without having already created an 0.0.X id on the network. The new user only needs to provide their public key, and when a sponsor account sends ℏ "to" their key via a new AccountID.alias field, the network automatically creates an account with their key. Additional transfers to and from an auto-created account may also use its alias instead of the account id.
An alias may also be used to get the account balance and account info for the account. (Do note there is a known issue that causes the getAccountInfo query response to echo back the account alias instead of its 0.0.<num> id; this will be fixed in the next release. Please use the free getAccountBalance query to check the 0.0.<num> id that corresponds to an alias.) You will be able to use the alias in all other transactions and queries in a future release.
Meanwhile our team continues exhaustive due diligence for Smart Contracts 2.0... 🚀
Contributors
We'd like to thank all the contributors who worked on this release!