Vanity addresses

Find addresses that start with a word you choose for Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero and Zcash, on your own graphics chip, or have someone else search without ever learning your key.

#Your word, found by your own graphics chip

Type cafe, select Start, and your computer's graphics chip starts racing through Ethereum keys, about 285 million addresses a second on an M3 Pro, until one turns up that begins 0xcafe…. AirWallet derives the address from that key again, to be sure, and puts the find into your wallet already encrypted. The key came from fresh randomness on your own machine, so nobody else has ever seen it.

A couple of things here are less obvious than they sound. For Bitcoin and Ethereum, a friend with a bigger graphics card can run the search for you and still never learn the key they find. And a Zcash vanity address can be one of the shielded addresses your existing wallet already has, which makes it every bit as private as the others.

#What a vanity address is

A vanity address is an ordinary address that happens to contain a word you chose, usually at the start. It works like any other address, and senders don't need to do anything different. The only difference is how it was found: by trying keys, one after another, until an address matches.

Every extra character makes a find much rarer. Depending on the kind of address, each character multiplies the search time by about 16 (Ethereum's 0–9 and a–f), 32 (Bitcoin's bc1… addresses) or 58 (addresses that use base58, like Solana's). Before you start, the search sheet estimates how long a find will take.

#Where you can search

The offline signer can search too, in the desktop app's offline mode and in the offline Chrome extension. The key is then made on the offline device and never touches an online one.

#Which coins

Some details for each coin:

• Bitcoin bc1p… is Taproot of the key itself, not the tweaked kind wallets usually make. AirWallet spends it, and other wallets can import its key as rawtr.
• Bitcoin bc1q… addresses can't contain b, i, o or 1, or capitals. If your word needs one of those letters, the sheet offers 1… (legacy) instead, which can spell it.
• Ethereum: Capitals as typed is on by default. Your word's capitals then show exactly as typed in the address's checksum (0xdEaD…). Each letter doubles the search time. Turn it off if you don't mind which letters are capitals.
• Monero addresses all begin between 41d… and 4BK…, so only some words fit right after the 4. The sheet tells you when a word can't be there and why. Words can be up to 10 characters right after the 4, or 9 from the third character.
• Zcash shielded finds stay fully private. Any wallet restored from the same recovery phrase receives on them. Choose Works with every wallet (Orchard and Sapling) or 3x faster (Orchard only). Look-alikes count too also accepts spellings like 4 for a or 3 for e.
• Zcash transparent (t1…) addresses are public, like Bitcoin's. Your recovery phrase doesn't cover these keys, so back each one up (see "Back up your finds" below).

#Start a search

1. Select +, then Find a vanity address.
2. Choose the coin.
3. Type your words, one per line. Any one of them counts as a find. The sheet shows how the address will look, and the time a find usually takes on an M3 Pro's graphics chip.
4. Choose Stop after: how many finds you want.
5. Select Start.

You can close the sheet: the search carries on until it's done, and it keeps the computer awake while it runs. Select Stop to end it early.

Each find becomes a wallet of its own, named after its word. To keep a search's finds together, choose Put the finds in a new group. The Vanity screen's History lists your recent searches, each with its finds.

#Commands and presets

You can save any search as a single line of text, and paste it back later to run the same search.

• In a coin's search sheet, Copy as command copies the settings as a command. Save as preset keeps them under a name.
• In Find a vanity address, open Command line & presets. Paste a command and select Its settings to check it first, or Start it to start straight away. Your presets are listed there too.

Some examples:

vanity btc --type taproot --words satsfun --stop 3
vanity eth --words dEaD,cafe --case exact --stop 1
vanity xmr --where third --words Cafe,moon --stop 3
vanity request airv1:... --stop 1

Solana searches have commands too: set up the search in the sheet and use Copy as command to see its line. The box also reads the search engines' own command lines.

#Let someone else search (split keys)

A long Bitcoin or Ethereum word can take days on a laptop. Someone with fast graphics cards (a friend, or a rented server) can search for you, and they never learn the key.

How it stays safe: your wallet keeps a secret half of the key and gives the searcher only the matching public half. They find a number that, added to your secret half, makes a key whose address starts with your word. Only your wallet can do that last step. To get your key from what they have, they would have to break the cryptography Bitcoin and Ethereum rely on.

This works for bc1q…, bc1p…, 1…, 3… and 0x… addresses. It doesn't work for Solana, whose keys can't be split this way.

To ask for one:

1. Select +, then Someone else. (On a device that can't search itself, it's called Vanity by someone else.)
2. Pick the kind of address.
3. Choose My word and type the start you want. Or choose Any nice word with a shortest word length, and you get the first good word from the searcher's word lists.
4. Select Create request, then share the request code (it starts airv1:). The code isn't secret, but it does show which address you're after.
5. When the searcher sends back a result code (it starts airvr1:), paste it under Their result and select Add the wallet.

Your wallet checks the result against the address before it adds the key. Keep this copy of AirWallet until the result comes back, because the secret half lives only there. If you forget a request, a result for it can never become a key.

To search for someone else's request in AirWallet, open the Bitcoin or Ethereum search sheet and select Search for someone's request instead. The finds are result codes with no key in them, which you send back to the person who asked.

#Finds made before October 13, 2026 are linked

Until October 13, 2026, the finds from a single search weren't independent of each other. They came from related starting points, so anyone holding the private key of one find could work out the keys of other finds from the same search. Finds from different searches aren't linked.

Since October 13, 2026, every find on every coin starts from its own fresh randomness, and one key says nothing about another. An update can't change finds that were already made, though.

What to do about older finds:

• If you keep every find of an older search to yourself, nothing changes. The link only matters once one of those keys reaches someone else.
• Before you give away, sell or share the key of an older find, move the coins in the other finds from that search to new wallets. Or search for the word again with the current version, and give away the new find instead.
• If a key from an older search has leaked, treat every find from that search as exposed, and move their coins to new wallets.

The Vanity screen's History shows which finds came from which search.

#Back up your finds

Most vanity finds are single keys, and no recovery phrase covers them. That applies to Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero and Zcash transparent finds. If you lose the device without a backup, the coins at those addresses are gone.

Back them up with Settings → Back up all keys, or turn on automatic backups. A Monero find's backup is its 25 words: open the wallet's ⋯ menu, then Export private key. The one exception is a Zcash shielded find. It belongs to a recovery-phrase wallet, so the phrase already covers it.

See Backups and recovery.

#Speeds

These are the speeds we've measured on an Apple M3 Pro. They count addresses (or keys) checked per second. Other chips will differ.