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Public Key

The shareable half of a blockchain key pair, derived from the private key; used to receive funds and verify signatures.

FBFenwei BianAuthorVZVictor ZhouEditorJune 22, 2026
  • 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

  • address
  • verification key
  • asymmetric cryptography
  • blockchain account
  • Public Key
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Contributors

Fenwei Bian

Software Developer & Writer • Namefi
Author

Fenwei Bian is a software developer in her thirties who spends her working hours in pull requests and her weekends with her hands in soil or sawdust. Years of open source on GitHub taught her that names are interfaces: a good one is clear, honest about what it does, and kind to whoever has to use it next.

She gardens because it rewards patience and punishes wishful thinking, and she does woodwork because a joint either fits or it doesn't. Both habits show up in how she writes about naming — measure twice, check the source, and don't sand over a rough spot and hope no one notices.

For Namefi she writes about how domain markets actually move, the practical trade-offs of tokenizing and flipping names, and picking a domain you'll still be glad you own in twenty years.

GitHub

Victor Zhou

Founder & Standards Editor • Namefi
Editor

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.

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