Public Key
The shareable half of a blockchain key pair, derived from the private key; used to receive funds and verify signatures.
- glossary
A public key is the shareable half of a blockchain account's cryptographic key pair. It — or the address derived from it — is safe to publish openly: it is where others send tokens or call smart contracts on your behalf. The public key is derived from the private key through one-way elliptic-curve math, so sharing it never exposes the secret that authorizes transactions. Verifying a digital signature against the public key proves that a message was signed by the holder of the matching private key, which is how the network confirms a transaction is genuinely authorized.
Related keywords
- public key
- address
- verification key
- asymmetric cryptography
- blockchain account
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.