Wallets & Accounts

How accounts work

Valdium uses an account model: every account (user or contract) has persistent state { balance, nonce, codeHash, storageRoot }. Transactions mutate account state and carry a monotonically increasing per-account nonce for replay protection. The pre-mainnet VLD token, by contrast, is a standard ERC-20 on Ethereum — the account model below describes the Valdium L1 itself.

Unlike Ethereum, accounts on Valdium are secured by ML-DSA-65 (Dilithium3) keypairs — NIST FIPS 204 post-quantum signatures, not ECDSA. There's no email, no password, no KYC. Your wallet is your account. If you have the private key, you control the address.

The signing experience is the same as any other modern wallet — the post-quantum cryptography is invisible to the end user. Your wallet handles key generation, signing, and verification transparently.

Address format

Valdium addresses are 20-byte hex strings with an EIP-55-style mixed-case checksum, derived from the public key:

address = BLAKE3(pubkey)[0:20]

Example:

0x5aC14fD3A2c0e8ee48B07C8A3D1Ebf27b0EeDF0C

Because Valdium public keys are Dilithium3 (not ECDSA), the address space is fundamentally its own. Addresses are derived from the Dilithium3 public key via BLAKE3 and rendered as 0x-prefixed hex, the same address format Ethereum uses.

Generate a wallet

There are three ways to generate a Valdium wallet:

Option A: Desktop App. Install Valdium Operator. Click "Create New Wallet" and write down your recovery phrase. No terminal required.

Option B: CLI. Install the CLI, then run:

valdium wallet create

This generates a new Dilithium3 keypair, encrypts it with scrypt + AES-GCM-256, and saves it to your keystore.

Option C: SDK.

import { generateKeypair, addressFromPublicKey } from '@valdium/crypto';

const { publicKey, secretKey } = await generateKeypair();
const address = addressFromPublicKey(publicKey);

Connect to the network

Valdium exposes a JSON-RPC API compatible with the EVM tooling ecosystem. Configure your wallet to point to the Valdium testnet RPC:

valdium config set rpc https://testnet.valdium.xyz

Securing your keys

Never share your private key or recovery phrase. Anyone with your private key controls your wallet and all assets in it. Store your recovery phrase offline — write it on paper, keep it safe.

For validator operators, hardware security modules (HSMs) or dedicated signing devices are recommended for production. The CLI supports external signers via the --signer flag.

Use the Network · Send a Transaction → Use the Network · Get Test VLD →