1.4 KiB
Bech32 on Cosmos
The Cosmos network prefers to use the Bech32 address format whereever users must handle binary data. Bech32 encoding provides robust integrity checks on data and the human readable part(HRP) provides contextual hints that can assist UI developers with providing informative error messages.
In the Cosmos network, keys and addresses may refer to a number of different roles in the network like accounts, validators etc.
HRP table
| HRP | Definition |
|---|---|
cosmosaccaddr |
Cosmos Account Address |
cosmosaccpub |
Cosmos Account Public Key |
cosmosvaladdr |
Cosmos Consensus Address |
cosmosvalpub |
Cosmos Consensus Public Key |
Encoding
While all user facing interfaces to Cosmos software should exposed bech32 interfaces, many internal interfaces encode binary value in hex or base64 encoded form.
To covert between other binary reprsentation of addresses and keys, it is important to first apply the Amino enocoding process before bech32 encoding.
A complete implementation of the Amino serialization format is unncessary in most cases. Simply prepending bytes from this table to the bytestring payload before bech32 encoding will sufficient for compatible representation.