Skip to main content

Hotkeys generation

This page will explain how to generate a hotkey for neuron management. The recommended way to get hotkeys is to programmatically generate them using the same process used in the public ic repository. However, it is possible to generate hotkeys manually as described below. This page is a step-by-step guide with some examples showing the data format to expect.

Manual process​

The manual hotkey generation process consists in generating a PEM file, then deriving the corresponding private and public keys.

Generate PEM​

To generate the keys, start with generating a private PEM file:

openssl genpkey -algorithm ed25519 -outform PEM -out private.pem

Example output:

-----BEGIN PRIVATE KEY-----
MC4CAQAwBQYDK2VwBCIEIHAOt4HGrNdcIFhBy7N9p6iq3iRowd4NZjDZ8aaaDCcX
-----END PRIVATE KEY-----

Then create the public PEM from it:

openssl pkey -in private.pem -pubout > public.pem

Example output:

-----BEGIN PUBLIC KEY-----
MCowBQYDK2VwAyEA4JKtE2KNVUTo96cl202FgWv5ctwP7f1ds1O73PZ6+VE=
-----END PUBLIC KEY-----

Generating hex key representation​

Create the private DER file:

openssl pkey -inform pem -outform der -in private.pem -out private.der

Create the public DER file:

openssl pkey -inform pem -outform der -in private.pem -out public.der -pubout

Hex representation​

The generated DER files are in a binary format not intended to be readable by humans. But we can get a hex representation of both keys:

Private key​

xxd -p private.der

Example output:

302e020100300506032b657004220420700eb781c6acd75c205841cbb37d
a7a8aade2468c1de0d6630d9f1a69a0c2717

Public key​

xxd -p public.der

302a300506032b6570032100e092ad13628d5544e8f7a725db4d85816bf9
72dc0fedfd5db353bbdcf67af951

We need to keep only the last 32 bytes of the public key:

xxd -s 12 -c 32 -p public.der

Example output:

e092ad13628d5544e8f7a725db4d85816bf972dc0fedfd5db353bbdcf67af951

This is the public key you can use in Rosetta operations to identify your hotkey!

FAQ​

  • Why do I get "Algorithm ed25519 not found" while generating the PEM file?

The version of OpenSSL included in MacOS doesn't support ed25519 by default. You may have to install another version of OpenSSL (for example through brew), or run the command from a Linux machine.