Unified Addresses & Full-node RPC API

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In the zcashd full node wallet, we expose Unified Addresses via “accounts”. An account corresponds to the set of spending keys that can spend the funds received by a Unified Address. Every account has a single Unified Full Viewing Key (1-to-1 mapping), and can also have multiple Unified Addresses (via the “diversified addresses” feature we introduced in Sapling and kept in Orchard).

  • You create a new account with z_getnewaccount, which gives you the account number ACCOUNT (0 for the first account).
  • You then generate a Unified Address ADDRESS with z_getaddressforaccount ACCOUNT. Calling this multiple times will return sequential Unified Addresses.
  • Check balance with z_getbalanceforaccount ACCOUNT.
  • Send funds from the account by using z_sendmany ADDRESS ...
    • That is, if you specify any address from an account as the source of funds, z_sendmany will select funds from the whole account. There isn’t a perfect match between old-style addresses and accounts; we’re planning a new account-focused spending API.
  • Backup using z_exportwallet which exports the wallet’s mnemonic phrase, from which all accounts are derived. The new zcashd-wallet-tool can also be used (and in fact you are prompted to use it IIRC).
  • We don’t support importing keys for Unified Addresses or accounts. We are planning to add some way to initialize a wallet from an existing mnemonic (the full node UX of the zcashd wallet makes this rather hard).
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