Zilliqa Migrates to New Address Format
Hello everyone,
In order to give you a better and more convenient user experience, we have decided to change Zilliqa’s address format.
Reason: Zilliqa’s current address format consists of 20 bytes, just like Ethereum’s and this led to some confusion. Any tokens mistakenly sent to the wrong address would lead to irreversible loss of the tokens. This is because the one address on Zilliqa does not correspond to the same private key on Zilliqa as it does on Ethereum, due to the difference of hash functions used (sha256 vs keccak respectively).
Previous Solution: Zilliqa previous address format utilises a different 20 bytes checksum mechanism from Ethereum in order to prevent the issue of erroneous funds transfers between an Ethereum and a Zilliqa address. However, due to EIP-55 being not widely adopted by wallets and exchanges, this solution became not viable as a preventive mechanism.
New Solution: To resolve this issue, we have decided to adopt the bech32 encoding instead with a human readable prefix of zil to ensure there is no ambiguity. This will also ensure that all erroneous transactions via any wallets and exchanges will be rejected by both the Ethereum and Zilliqa network.
We’re excited to make this change with all our community developers and adopt this new address standard. At this time, we would like to advise everyone to ask us any questions if you have doubts during this token swap process.
NOTE: Users are not required to recreate a new public/private keypair in preparation for this transition. The keypair will remain the same and you can access your account as per normal as this is a cosmetic change only. Therefore, there is no actions required by all Users.
We are currently in talks with various wallets to migrate to the new format by the end of next week, 31st May 2019. Currently, the old format remains valid until otherwise indicated in this adoption status board: https://github.com/Zilliqa/Zilliqa/wiki/Address-Standard#current-adoption
To ensure that this is a smooth process for everyone, we will keep the status board up-to-date during this transition phase. Thank you all for your understanding, let us accelerate this process and pressed forward towards more adoption of Zilliqa!