Vanity Address Estimator

Estimate how long it would take to mine a cryptocurrency vanity address with a given prefix or suffix.

How It Works

A vanity address is a cryptocurrency wallet address that contains a specific pattern chosen by the user, such as 0xdead... or 0xcafe.... Since addresses are derived from randomly generated private keys, finding one with a desired pattern requires generating many keys and checking each result.

The Math

For Ethereum, each character in the address (after 0x) is a hexadecimal digit with 16 possible values (0–9, a–f). The probability of a random address matching a prefix of length n is:

P = (1 / 16)ⁿ = 1 / 16ⁿ

The expected number of attempts to find a match follows a geometric distribution, so on average you need:

Attempts = 16ⁿ

For a suffix match, the probability is the same since the address characters are uniformly distributed. For a contains match (pattern anywhere in the address), the probability is higher because there are multiple positions where the pattern could appear.

Case Sensitivity (EIP-55)

Ethereum uses EIP-55 mixed-case checksum encoding, where uppercase and lowercase letters encode a checksum. If case-sensitive matching is enabled, each hex letter (a–f) has only a ~1/22 probability of appearing with the correct case (rather than 1/16), because the case depends on the keccak256 hash of the address. This makes case-sensitive patterns significantly harder to find.

Bitcoin Addresses

Bitcoin legacy addresses (starting with 1) use Base58Check encoding with 58 possible characters per position. Bech32 addresses (starting with bc1q) use 32 possible characters per position. The same geometric probability applies, just with different base values.

Time Estimate

The estimated mining time depends on your hardware’s key generation speed:

Time = Attempts / Speed

Difficulty by Pattern Length