# Two different standards

## **Major Differences**

### **Address Format:**

An Ethereum address is a 42-character hexadecimal address derived from the last 20 bytes of the public key controlling the account with 0x appended in front.

Polkadot (and Substrate) use the SS58 address format. This is a broad "meta-format" designed to handle many different cryptographic schemes and chains. It has much in common with Bitcoin's Base58Check format such as a version prefix, a hash-based checksum suffix, and base-58 encoding.

### **Public Key vs. Hash-based:**

In general, every account has an owner who possesses a public and private key pair. The **private key** is a cryptographically-secure sequence of randomly-generated numbers. For human readability, the private key generates a random sequence of words called a **secret seed phrase** or **mnemonic**. The secret seed phrase is important because it can be used to recover access to an account if the private key is lost.

For most networks, the **public key** associated with an account is how that account is identified on the network and some form of it is used as the destination address for transactions. However, Substrate-based chains use the underlying public key to derive one or more **public addresses**. Instead of using the public key directly, Substrate allows you generate multiple addresses and address formats for an account.


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