User Accounts

Within Quai Network, user accounts are the fundamental building block of the network. They act as an abstracted form of identification, to sign transactions and messages, and interact with applications.

Quai Network utilizes a sharded address space across its multi-chain network. A user's address is not only a unique identifier, but also a mapping of the shard that the user is interacting with. Knowing which shard a user is on is essential for your application and orchestrating how your users interact with the network. More information on Quai's sharded address space can be found in the Quai Network Docs.

Pelagus handles Quai accounts via an account based representation of each address with its corresponding shard. Wallets may have multiple accounts, each with a unique address that maps to a specific shard in the network. When a user changes their "account" in the context of the wallet or your application, it typically means that they are changing the both the shard and address that they are connected with. This is important to note when handling accounts within your application.

Requesting Accounts

To initiate a transaction or message signature, your application must have access to a user's accounts. Applications should only prompt a user to grant access to their accounts following a direct user action, such as click a connect button. This prevents your application from spamming users with permission requests.

Pelagus has two methods of requesting user accounts:

• quai_requestAccounts: Requests access to a user's accounts via an extension pop-up.
• quai_accounts: Returns an array of accounts owned by the user if permission has already been granted.

Handling Accounts

Pelagus will always return an array that contains the address of the shard the user is currently connected with. Because Pelagus returns no information regarding the shard that the address maps to, it can be useful to import the getShardFromAddress method from the quais SDK in order to derive the shard the address is on.

An example of address shard determination:

requestAccounts.js

import { getShardFromAddress } from 'quais/lib/utils'

export const requestAccounts = async () => {
	await window.ethereum
		.request({ method: 'quai_requestAccounts' })
		.then((accounts) => {
			const shard = getShardFromAddress(accounts[0])
			const address = {
				shard: shard,
				address: accounts[0],
			}
			console.log('Account:', address)
		})
		.catch((error) => {
			if (error.code === 4001) {
				// EIP-1193 userRejectedRequest error
				console.log('User rejected request')
			} else {
				console.error(error)
			}
		})
}

Implementing the requestAccounts method into a connect button:

ConnectButton.jsx

import { requestAccounts } from './requestAccounts';
import { useState } from 'react';

export default const ConnectButton = () => {
    const [account, setAccount] = useState([]);

    const handleConnect = () => {
        requestAccounts().then((accounts) => {
            setAccounts(accounts);
        });
    };

    return (
        <button onClick={handleConnect}>
            {accounts.length > 0 ? 'Connected' : 'Connect'}
        </button>
    );
};