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.

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).

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!

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.