The account manager (AM) is a stand-alone binary which allows users to generate and manage the cryptographic keys necessary to interact with Ethereum Serenity.

The AM is responsible for the following tasks:

• Generation of cryptographic key pairs
  • Must acquire sufficient entropy to ensure keys are generated securely (TBD)
• Secure storage of private keys
  • Keys must be encrypted while at rest on the disk (TBD)
  • The format is compatible with the validator client
• Produces messages and transactions necessary to initiate staking on Ethereum 1.x (TPD)

The AM is not a service, and does not run continuously, nor does it interact with any running services. It is intended to be executed separately from other Lighthouse binaries and produce files which can be consumed by them.&

Simply run ./account_manager generate to generate a new random private key, which will be automatically saved to the correct directory.

If you prefer to use our "deterministic" keys for testing purposes, simply run ./account_manager generate_deterministic -i <index>, where index is the validator index for the key. This will reliably produce the same key each time and save it to the directory.