In Hedera Services 0.21.2 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. You will be able to use the alias in all other transactions and queries in a future release.
📝 This tag includes fixes for the following issues:
- #2653 - A
getAccountInforesponse to a query made with an alias now returns theAccountIDinstead of echoing the alias. - #2674 - A
getScheduleInfoquery now returns the correctKeytype for a schedule signed with ECDSA(secp256k1) keys. - #2688 - An
updateTopictransaction that uses an0.0.<alias>id for a new auto-renew account is now rejected withINVALID_ACCOUNT_ID, instead of this id being interpreted as the0.0.0sentinel used to remove a topic's auto-renew account. (Note that in release 0.22, it will be valid to use an0.0.<alias>id here.)
Contributors
We'd like to thank all the contributors who worked on this release!