TUTORIAL: Creating æternity Paper Wallets
Tutorial Overview
This tutorial will walk you through the steps of creating your own æternity paper wallet(s), including generation of accounts, broadcasting multiple transactions at once and generating QR codes.
Wait… what is a paper wallet?
Paper wallets are useful tools for securing and sending AE tokens. A paper wallet is simply a pair of QR codes (a public and a private key) printed on a piece of paper that users can use to store and send AE tokens. It is possible to use a paper wallet to quickly claim a reward in AE tokens by simply scanning a QR code. As such, AE paper wallets can be used for various promotional campaigns, bounties, event-related usecases, or for simply storing your AE in secure, off-line environemnt.
Prerequisites
- Docker
- Installed Aecli – For installation steps refer to this tutorial
Step 1. Prepare your environment
First things first, we need to setup our working directories. Lets create a directory named paper-wallets. We will use this directory to execute all the following commands.
mkdir paper-wallets && cd paper-wallets
We would also need one more directory data – data where the various artifacts of the paper wallets will be created.
mkdir data
Step 2. Create funding account
In order to create paper wallets we need an AE account to fund them. Lets create a sdk-testnet account and get some test AE. Alternatively you can use your own testnet/mainnet accounts and skip this section or ask for some actual AE in the Forum:
2.1 Generating the funding account
The following command will create an AE account and save it in sender.json file inside data
aecli account create data/sender.json -P my_example_password
Your result will look something like this:
Wallet saved
Wallet address________________ ak_254JeRHzmiNVse7KFsqDG7L3WWEZXvCXkbSKK7hmBapWq9Uua8
Wallet path___________________ /Users/my_user/paper-wallets/data/sender.json
2.2 Add some funds to your account
In order to add some funds to your account head to https://faucet.aepps.com/. Paste your wallet address (ex. ak_254JeRHzmiNVse7KFsqDG7L3WWEZXvCXkbSKK7hmBapWq9Uua8) and you will be given 5 AE. Do that 2-3 times.
Verify that you have your AE in your account using:
aecli -u https://sdk-testnet.aepps.com account balance data/sender.json -P my_example_password
You should see something like:
Your balance is: 15000000000000000000
2.3 Get and write down your nonce
At a later stage we would need the nonce of this account. Verify that it is 0 by adjusting and running the following command:
aecli -u https://sdk-testnet.aepps.com inspect ak_254JeRHzmiNVse7KFsqDG7L3WWEZXvCXkbSKK7hmBapWq9Uua8 -P my_example_password
Note Change the address to your own. You can skip the -u argument for mainnet.
You should see something like this:
Account ID______________________________ ak_254JeRHzmiNVse7KFsqDG7L3WWEZXvCXkbSKK7hmBapWq9Uua8
Account balance_________________________ 15000000000000000000
Account nonce___________________________ 0
Step 3. Creating and funding accounts for the paper wallets
3.1 Create paper wallet accounts
Every paper wallet is an account itself. We need to create these paper wallet accounts first. For this we will use docker and the image aeternity/paperwallets. The following command will automatically download the image and create 5 accounts for your 5 paper wallets.
docker run -it --volume=$PWD/data:/data/paperw aeternity/paperwallets
gen -n 5 -f /data/paperw/data.db.sqlite
You can easily create more/less accounts by changing the -n argument value.
3.2 Generate and broadcast paper-wallet transactions
Lets fund our paper-wallets through the wallet we created in the previous step. We need to do that in two steps – first generating fund transactions and then broadcasting them.
We will again use docker for generation of the fund transactions:
docker run -it --volume=$PWD/data:/data/paperw aeternity/paperwallets txs-prepare -f /data/paperw/data.db.sqlite --amount 1 --nonce 1 --keystore /data/paperw/sender.json --network-id ae_uat
This command will ask for your account password. If you have followed this step by step it should be my_example_password.
The amount parameter is how much each paper-wallet will have denominated in AE. In our case each wallet will have 1 AE
The nonce parameter should be the nonce you saw when you inspected your wallet plus one. If you want to use this on mainnet skip the –network-id parameter.
The result of this command should look like this:
top up 1AE to account ak_2nRHEtmFgmzpDBEDbceG92am1vwyaeyQSx7LHFiLrce8MXbaBk
top up 1AE to account ak_2th5G8yRaPUeSpJc3N2StwhBvnwqhGDzRmbTUSQ1aN2RVp7fC2
top up 1AE to account ak_WkjvoGDHKwMidWaTH3Z385yLAe6cx4rX5UwQUtuePMEE5KKMn
top up 1AE to account ak_pQZLHFEGgC6pNwA9KK82uEtVgme2EvxYFMhLB8pBnbyepXP3N
top up 1AE to account ak_z6QGgGpSCFc7QdV9qidH3MLpSnjT72DgcLtnjWhSnSRw5VSjM
The only thing we are left to do is broadcast these transactions. Docker is going to help us again here:
docker run -it --volume=$PWD/data:/data/paperw aeternity/paperwallets txs-broadcast -f /data/paperw/data.db.sqlite --epoch-url https://sdk-testnet.aepps.com
Note: If you want to use this on mainnet skip the –epoch-url parameter.
Your paper wallet accounts are funded now. The result should look something like this:
tx hash th_2cS5HQicY5tjWM1ZLRrQYifjuoTHF2WviP4MovrsqQYxxoBuKj broadcasted: th_2cS5HQicY5tjWM1ZLRrQYifjuoTHF2WviP4MovrsqQYxxoBuKj
tx hash th_29UDWB2vouCYwTmTDTD541RZxZfPkdZ4DAzfJEE1fzQRnwVNuY broadcasted: th_29UDWB2vouCYwTmTDTD541RZxZfPkdZ4DAzfJEE1fzQRnwVNuY
tx hash th_2LSyKZmA77U8M2i5tAhf7gJuUWFUdYgFaj45xy1fUuVBGhAYVB broadcasted: th_2LSyKZmA77U8M2i5tAhf7gJuUWFUdYgFaj45xy1fUuVBGhAYVB
tx hash th_73H8ZkVyzVgHQCPRpXspWu9pz92xPCYiH2XFEfS5xbLFdZHfD broadcasted: th_73H8ZkVyzVgHQCPRpXspWu9pz92xPCYiH2XFEfS5xbLFdZHfD
tx hash th_LcNYbAUddneanPw4frRUNB7fr7Zc2h3k131u9godj65wPQLGx broadcasted: th_LcNYbAUddneanPw4frRUNB7fr7Zc2h3k131u9godj65wPQLGx
Step 4. Generate the paper wallets
4.1 Generate the paper wallet fronts
In order to generate the PDF paper wallets out of these accounts you can execute the following command
docker run -it --volume=$PWD/data:/data/paperw aeternity/paperwallets
paperwallets
-f /data/paperw/data.db.sqlite
-o /data/paperw/pdfs
In your data/pdfs directory you can now see the 5 pdf paper wallets ready to be claimed.
4.2 Generate the paper wallet backs
As this is only the frontside of the paper-wallets, you can find and the back-sides of the paper-wallets here
Redeeming a paper wallet
In order to redeem a paper wallet you can head to https://redeem.aepps.com/#/ or use the AirGap Vault app. You will be asked to scan the QR code and following the instructions you will be able to redeem the paper wallet.
Conclusion
Paper wallets are a great tool to create physical wallets (existing in the real world) and use them for promotional, exchange, bounty or security purposes. Following this easy guide you can create your own unique usable AE paper wallets. The æpps team plans to enable paper wallet generation and management in an æpp. If you want this to happen faster – your are interested in developing the æpps – get in touch by sending us a mail at [email protected] or send a DM to Edward from the æpps team in the Forum.
The æternity team will keep this tutorial updated. If you encounter any problems please contract us through the æternity dev Forum category.