Zilliqa: bech32 address standard

[fedor-ivn]

Motivation

Although the Zilliqa protocol utilizes 20-byte base16 checksum addresses on the backend, bech32 addresses are widely adopted in the Zilliqa ecosystem by wallets and SDKs. As a result, bech32 addresses are only visible to end users.

For reference, ViewBlock explorer for Zilliqa supports bech32 addresses. See this example. We should also have similar support for bech32 addresses in Blockscout.

UI customizations

For the MVP, we should add support to convert EVM hex addresses (base16) to bech32 format. This change will affect every component that displays raw EVM addresses (0x...). In my vision, the 0x... address components can become clickable, triggering the conversion to bech32 format when clicked. For example 0x87df0306F147e752805261156d5a00d912786B18 should become zil1qzra7qcx79r7w55q2fs32m26qrv3y7rtrk8hjl7 when clicked and vice versa.

Implementation details

To handle the conversion, we can use the bech32 npm package. As I found out, It’s a widely adopted library for this task.

Zilliqa bech32 address structure

	Human-readable prefix	Separator	bech32 formatted address	Checksum
Example 1	zil	1	02n74869xnvdwq3yh8p0k9jjgtejruft	268tg8
Example 2	zil	1	48fy8yjxn6jf5w36kqc7x73qd3ufuu24	a4u8t9
Example 3	zil	1	fdv7u7rll9epgcqv9xxh9lhwq427nsql	58qcs9

• The prefix for the Zilliqa mainnet is zil, and for the developer testnet, it’s also zil.
• The last six characters form a checksum, which contains no additional information.

For further details, refer to the Zilliqa Address Standard (Bech32) documentation here.

Test Cases

base16 Address	bech32 Address
0x7Aa7eA9f4534d8D70224b9c2FB165242F321F12b	zil102n74869xnvdwq3yh8p0k9jjgtejruft268tg8
0x1d19918a737306218b5cbb3241fcdcbd998c3a72	zil1r5verznnwvrzrz6uhveyrlxuhkvccwnju4aehf

To create additional test cases, you can use this online converter, which also is open-source and available on GitHub.

Further bech32 support

It would be cool if we extend this feature to handle bech32 addresses in URLs, allowing links like https://zilliqa.blockscout.com/address/zil102n74869xnvdwq3yh8p0k9jjgtejruft268tg8 to redirect to the correct address page.

[fedor-ivn]

I think it might be useful to make the bech32 prefix configurable through some env, leaving zil as a default value.

[fedor-ivn]

Nevertheless, the default format should be base16

[fedor-ivn]

The layouts are prepared. Check it out here:

https://www.figma.com/design/3AREwPxLneFINGD2jt7RGS/Zilliqa%3A-bech32-address-standard?node-id=1-3374&t=ldnkRpzQRsiuiUY8-1

[tom2drum]

New frontend ENV variables example (for Zilliqa chain):

NEXT_PUBLIC_VIEWS_ADDRESS_FORMAT=['bech32','base16']
NEXT_PUBLIC_VIEWS_ADDRESS_BECH_32_PREFIX=zil