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What is a wallet address

Every blockchain account is identified by an address — a public identifier derived from a cryptographic key pair.
  • On EVM chains: 0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045 (42 hex characters, 0x-prefixed)
  • On Solana: vines1vzrYbzLMRdu58ou5XTby4qAqVRLmqo36NKPTg (base58, ~44 characters)
Your address is public and safe to share — it is how others send tokens to you. Think of it like an email address: knowing it gives someone a way to reach you, but not access to your account.

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What is a private key

The private key is the secret that proves ownership of an address. It authorizes transactions from that address. Anyone who knows your private key can move all funds in the wallet. Most users encounter private keys indirectly through a seed phrase (also called a mnemonic or recovery phrase) — a human-readable sequence of 12 or 24 words that encodes the key. The seed phrase is the master secret: anyone who has it can recreate the private key and access the funds. In traditional wallets (like MetaMask or a hardware wallet), the private key is a single secret. This creates a single point of failure: if the key is lost or stolen, the funds are gone.

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MPC wallets and key shares

Multi-party computation (MPC) wallets eliminate the single point of failure by splitting signing authority across multiple parties. Instead of one private key held by one person, the system generates multiple key shares — each held by a different party. Signing a transaction requires a threshold number of parties to cooperate; no single share is useful on its own. See MPC Model for how Cobo implements this.

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How addresses are organized in Cobo Agentic Wallet

In Cobo Agentic Wallet, a wallet is a logical container that can hold multiple addresses across one or more chains. Your wallet has a single wallet ID, but can have distinct on-chain addresses on Ethereum, Base, Polygon, Solana, and more. 
Wallet (one wallet ID)
├── 0xAbcDef...  (ETH / BASE_ETH / MATIC — same address across EVM chains)
├── 0x123456...  (ETH / BASE_ETH / MATIC — same address across EVM chains)
├── vines1v...   (SOL)
└── mN7dP2...    (SOL)
EVM chains share a deterministic address derivation scheme, so the same underlying key produces the same address on Ethereum, Base, and Polygon. This means a single 0x address is valid across all EVM chains — but each chain maintains its own independent balance, nonce, and contract state. Holding tokens on Ethereum at a given address does not make them available on Base at the same address. Solana uses a different derivation scheme and produces a distinct address format.