Solidity has become the de-facto standard language of smart contract programming, although this has been challenged over the years with various other languages such as Vyper. The EVM, itself being a unique target with it’s concepts of “gas” and other various builtins, has been very successful as a smart contract programming environment, and to this day still dominates the space of smart contract blockchains, though new paradigms such as Cosmos chains have mounted a valiant challenge.

This will be a short post that goes over how to generate so-called “vanity” Ethereum addresses. The implementation will be in Go, but the principle can probably be applied in any programming language that has a secp256k1 library (either by bindings to the C implementation by bitcoin-core or some other implementation) and an implementation of the Keccak-256 hash function.

Merkle trees are a pretty exotic sounding data structure but once you get the hang of them they’re actually deceptively simple and pretty useful.