Crypto & Blockchain Basics

What Is a Wallet?

A wallet is best thought of as a key ring plus a signer. It holds your cryptographic keys, and when an action needs to go to the blockchain — sending a transaction, or attesting to something — the wallet uses those keys to sign the instruction, proving it came from you without ever exposing the key itself.

Zipwire doesn't use wallets to hold or move money; here, a wallet's job is purely to sign attestations and prove identity. See Sign-in with Ethereum for how signing is used to prove wallet ownership when logging in, and Wallet Connections for a deeper look at wallet types.

Public Key, Private Key, and Wallet Address

• Private key: a secret known only to the wallet owner, used to sign things. Never shared.

• Public key: derived from the private key, used by others to verify a signature. Safe to share.

• Wallet address: a shorter, derived form of the public key — the "account number" others use to refer to your wallet.

You sign with the private key; everyone else verifies with the public key or address. Losing the private key means losing the wallet; leaking it means anyone can sign as you.

On-Chain vs. Off-Chain

• On-chain: written to the blockchain itself — permanent, public, and the same for everyone who looks it up. Zipwire writes attestation roots on-chain so they can't later be disputed or altered.

• Off-chain: everything else — the actual documents, Merkle trees, and proofs, held privately by each party rather than published to the blockchain. Off-chain data can be verified against an on-chain root without ever being uploaded anywhere.

Zipwire deliberately keeps as little as possible on-chain (just root hashes), and everything sensitive off-chain, in each party's own protected storage.

What Is Base?

Base is the specific blockchain Zipwire writes attestations to. It's a Layer 2 (L2) network built on top of Ethereum: transactions are cheaper and faster than on Ethereum itself, while still inheriting Ethereum's security. You don't need to interact with Base directly — Zipwire and its wallet integrations handle that — but it's the network you'd look attestations up on (e.g. via EAS Scan for Base).

Read More

Sign-in with EthereumUnderstanding Merkle Trees and ProofsAttestations