@ethereumjs/wallet v2.0.0-rc.1

New Package Name and General Library Update

This is the first release of this library under a new namespaced package name switching from:

• ethereumjs-wallet -> @ethereumjs/wallet

So the new version of the library can now be installed with:

npm i @ethereumjs/wallet

The wallet library has now also been integrated into the EthereumJS monorepo, see PR #2729 and PR #2739 and got a general update along the way aligning with the other EthereumJS libraries by e.g. switching from Buffer usage to Uint8Array and providing a hybrid CJS/ESM build.

Removed default Exports

All default exports for the libraries have been removed since these cause reoccuring import problems under certain build and usage conditions.

So imports needs to be updated as follows:

import Wallet from 'ethereumjs-wallet'
import { Wallet } from '@ethereumjs/wallet'

import { thirdparty } from 'ethereumjs-wallet'
import { thirdparty } from '@ethereumjs/wallet'

import { hdkey } from 'ethereumjs-wallet'
import { hdkey } from '@ethereumjs/wallet'

Hybrid CJS/ESM Build

We now provide both a CommonJS and an ESM build for all our libraries. 🥳 This transition was a huge undertaking and should make the usage of our libraries in the browser a lot more straight-forward, see PR #2685, #2783, #2786, #2764, #2804 and #2809 (and others). We rewrote the whole set of imports and exports within the libraries, updated or completely removed a lot of dependencies along the way and removed the usage of all native Node.js primitives (like https or util).

There are now two different build directories in our dist folder, being dist/cjs for the CommonJS and dist/esm for the ESM build. That means that direct imports (which you generally should try to avoid, rather open an issue on your import needs), need an update within your code (do a dist or the like code search).

Both builds have respective separate entrypoints in the distributed package.json file.

A CommonJS import of our libraries can then be done like this:

const { Chain, Common } = require('@ethereumjs/common')
const common = new Common({ chain: Chain.Mainnet })

And this is how an ESM import looks like:

import { Chain, Common } from '@ethereumjs/common'
const common = new Common({ chain: Chain.Mainnet })

Using ESM will give you additional advantages over CJS beyond browser usage like static code analysis / Tree Shaking which CJS can not provide.

Side note: along this transition we also rewrote our whole test suite (yes!!!) to now work with Vitest instead of Tape.

Buffer -> Uint8Array

With these releases we remove all Node.js specific Buffer usages from our libraries and replace these with Uint8Array representations, which are available both in Node.js and the browser (Buffer is a subclass of Uint8Array). While this is a big step towards interoperability and browser compatibility of our libraries, this is also one of the most invasive operations we have ever done, see the huge changeset from PR #2566, additional updates in #2607 as well as the Wallet specific update in #2739. 😋

We nevertheless think this is very much worth it and we tried to make transition work as easy as possible.

How to upgrade?

For this library you should check if you use one of the following constructors, methods, constants or types and do a search and update input and/or output values or general usages and add conversion methods if necessary:

// wallet
Wallet.fromPrivateKey()
Wallet.getPublicKey()
Wallet.verifyPublicKey()
Wallet.getAddress()
Wallet.toV3String()
Wallet.toV3()

// hdkey
EthereumHDKey.fromMasterSeed()

We have converted existing Buffer conversion methods to Uint8Array conversion methods in the @ethereumjs/util bytes module, see the respective README section for guidance.

Prefixed Hex Strings as Default

The mixed usage of prefixed and unprefixed hex strings is a constant source of errors in byte-handling code bases.

We have therefore decided to go "prefixed" by default, see PR #2830 and #2845.

The hexToBytes and bytesToHex methods, also similar methods like intToHex, now take 0x-prefixed hex strings as input and output prefixed strings. The corresponding unprefixed methods are marked as deprecated and usage should be avoided.

Please therefore check you code base on updating and ensure that values you are passing to constructors and methods are prefixed with a 0x.