# Externally Owned Account (EOA)

The basic function of an externally owned account is that it can hold a balance. Externally owned accounts are further capable of sending and receiving transactions.

The concept of externally owned accounts is quite similar to the concept of addresses in the Bitcoin protocol. An EOA is controlled by a private key that corresponds to its public key. The latter is hashed to determine the account address, while the former is used to generate signatures and authorize outbound transactions. An EOA is also capable of triggering contract code, meaning that it can be used to deploy smart contracts or trigger smart contract functionality.

If you gain access to the private key of an EOA, you gain full control of the account. Most popular wallets such as Metamask or imToken are simple EOAs

Users can use an EOA wallet as the Treasury of the pool created with Native. No private keys are shared with Native. The only connection between the EOA wallet and the Native pool contracts is the allowance given by the user.

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