1) The web3 journey begins with the mysterious seed phrase. A poetic name to abstract a cryptic machinery.

When you open a crypto wallet to self custody your assets, you’re asked to write down a list of 12 to 24 words.
This is your seed phrase, also called mnemonic or recovery phrase.

2) This phrase is a human readable version of a Master private key and is randomly composed from a list of 2048 words set by the BIP39 standard.
This list exists in 9 languages and I hope Swahili will come next.

3) From this single Master private key (also known as the Root private key), we can derive a large sequence of private/public key pairs and each private key can also derive a large sequence of key pairs.

So we end up with an almost endless fractal of key pairs and each of these pairs can be an account on a blockchain.

5) Voilà, I told you it was cryptic…fractally cryptic. All you have to keep in mind is that a single seed phrase is enough to generate and control a nearly infinite number of accounts, on any blockchain.

6) This raises the issue of key management which is still not understood and causing billions of $ in asset losses, either permanently locked or stolen. 

But there is a very near future where your web3 journey may not have to start with a seedphrase anymore thanks to account abstraction... see you on next post!

4) To put it simply, with the public key you can see what's in the account and with the private key you can transact. 

A common misconception is that the public key is your account address.
Actually, the account address is derived from the account public key using a specific hash algorithm (Keccak256 for #ethereum).