Subkey

Subkey is a commandline utility included with Substrate that generates or restores Substrate keys.

subkey will use the sr25519 cryptography by default. If you need to use the older ed25519 cryptography to generate or restore your key pass the --ed25519 flag to any of the commands.

Usage

Generate a random account

subkey generate

Will output a mnemonic phrase and give you the seed, public key, and address of a new account. DO NOT SHARE your mnemonic or seed with ANYONE it will give them access to your funds. If someone is making a transfer to you they will only need your Address.

Inspecting a key

You can inspect a given URI (mnemonic, seed, public key, or address) and recover the public key and the address.

subkey inspect <mnemonic,seed,pubkey,address>

OUTPUT:
  Public key (hex): 0x461edcf1ba99e43f50dec4bdeb3d1a2cf521ad7c3cd0eeee5cd3314e50fd424c
  Address (SS58): 5DeeNqcAcaHDSed2HYnqMDK7JHcvxZ5QUE9EKmjc5snvU6wF

Signing

subkey expects a message to come in on STDIN, one way to sign a message would look like this:

echo <msg> | subkey sign <seed,mnemonic>

OUTPUT:
a69da4a6ccbf81dbbbfad235fa12cf8528c18012b991ae89214de8d20d29c1280576ced6eb38b7406d1b7e03231df6dd4a5257546ddad13259356e1c3adfb509

Verifying a signature

echo <msg> | subkey verify <sig> <address>

OUTPUT:
Signature verifies correctly.

Using the vanity generator

You can use the included vanity generator to find a seed that provides an address which includes the desired pattern. Be warned, depending on your hardware this may take a while.

subkey vanity 1337

Signing a transaction

Sign a transaction from an encoded Call.

subkey sign-transaction \
	--call <call-as-hex> \
	--nonce 0 \
	--suri <secret-uri> \
	--password <password> \
	--prior-block-hash <prior-block-hash-as-hex>

Will output a signed and encoded UncheckedMortalCompactExtrinsic as hex.