ERC-3770: Chain-specific addresses

Prepending chain-specific addresses with a human-readable chain identifier

Abstract

ERC-3770 introduces a new address standard to be adapted by wallets and dApps to display chain-specific addresses by using a human-reacable prefix.

Motivation

The need for this proposal emerges from the increasing adoption of non-Ethereum Mainnet chains that use the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). In this context, addresses become ambiguous, as the same address may refer to an EOA on chain X or a smart contract on chain Y. This will eventually lead to Ethereum users losing funds due to human error. For example, users sending funds to a smart contract wallet address which was not deployed on a particular chain.

Therefore we should prefix addresses with a unique identifier that signals to Dapps and wallets on what chain the target account is. In theory, this prefix could be a EIP-155 chainID. However, these chain IDs are not meant to be displayed to users in dApps or wallets, and they were optimized for developer interoperability, rather than human readability.

Specification

This proposal extends addresses with a human-readable blockchain short name.

Syntax

A chain-specific address is prefixed with a chain shortName, separated with a colon sign (:).

Chain-specific address = “shortName” “:” “address”

• shortName = STRING

• address = STRING

Semantics

`shortName` is mandatory and MUST be a valid chain short name from https://github.com/ethereum-lists/chains
  
`address` is mandatory and MUST be a [ERC-55](./eip-55.md) compatible hexadecimal address

Examples

Rationale

To solve the initial problem of user-facing addresses being ambiguous in a multichain context, we need to map EIP-155 chain IDs with a user-facing format of displaying chain identifiers.

Backwards Compatibility

Ethereum addresses without the chain specifier will continue to require additional context to understand which chain the address refers to.

Security Considerations

The Ethereum List curators must consider how similar looking chain short names can be used to confuse users.

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.

Citation

Please cite this document as:

Lukas Schor (@lukasschor), Richard Meissner (@rmeissner), Pedro Gomes (@pedrouid), ligi <ligi@ligi.de>, "ERC-3770: Chain-specific addresses [DRAFT]," Ethereum Improvement Proposals, no. 3770, August 2021. [Online serial]. Available: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-3770.