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.
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!