| Copyright | © 2018-2020 IOHK |
|---|---|
| License | Apache-2.0 |
| Safe Haskell | None |
| Language | Haskell2010 |
Cardano.Wallet.Primitive.Types.Address
Description
This module provides the main
Address
data type used by the wallet.
Synopsis
- newtype Address = Address { }
- data AddressState
Documentation
Representation of Cardano addresses.
Addresses are basically a human-friendly representation of public keys. Historically in Cardano, there exist different sort of addresses, and new ones are to come. So far, we can distinguish between three types of address:
- Byron Random addresses, which holds a payload with derivation path details
- Byron Sequential addresses, also known as Icarus'style addresses
- Shelley base addresses, see also implementation-decisions/address
For more details, see also About Address Derivation
Shelley base addresses can be divided into two types:
- Single Addresses: which only hold a public spending key
- Group Addresses: which hold both a spending and delegation keys
It'll therefore seem legitimate to represent addresses as:
data Address = ByronAddress !ByteString | SingleAddress !XPub | GroupAddress !XPub XPub
However, there's a major drawback to this approach: we have to consider all three constructors everywhere, and make sure we test every function using them three despite having no need for such fine-grained representation.
Indeed, from the wallet core code, addresses are nothing more than an opaque bunch of bytes that can be compared with each other. When signing transactions, we have to look up addresses anyway and therefore can re-derive their corresponding public keys. The only moment the distinction between address types matters is when it comes to representing addresses at the edge of the application (the API layer). And here, this is precisely where we need to also what target backend we're connected to. Different backends use different encodings which may not be compatible.
Therefore, for simplicity, it's easier to consider addresses as "bytes", and only peak into these bytes whenever we need to do something with them. This makes it fairly clear that addresses are just an opaque string for the wallet layer and that the underlying encoding is rather agnostic to the underlying backend.
Constructors
| Address | |
|
Fields |
|
Instances
data AddressState Source #
Denotes if an address has been previously used or not... whether that be in the output of a transaction on the blockchain or one in our pending set.