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The other day I was checking on my two ethereum accounts (they are 4+ years old).

There was a small "!" in etherscan.io that caught my eye: it alerted me that my first mainnet account hash is found also in ropsten and kovan testnets. My second mainnet account was replicated only in ropsten.

I got ...t scared!

Same account hash means that it has been generated from the same public key as mine, while that in turn has been generated from the same private key that is mine (see here)

Investigating more on the replicated account in ropsten, I saw that it had some "airdrop" tokens in there.

So has someone copied parts of mainnet into ropsten and then that same pumpkin fairy has airdropped me some tokens? I would have appreciated him/her not doing so & not giving me this halloween scare-time.

An explanation of what is going on would be highly appreciated.

El Sampsa
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I'll assume you mean public key/address -> since wallets are generating private/public keys in a deterministic way, in general based on a seed phrase (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/75), irregardless of the chain, your address is considered as "active" for actors having such a need.

Airdropped token, outside of active project rewarding their users, are mostly projects trying to artificially inflate their holders number (some aggregators like CG/CMC requires a threshold) or scam (requiring to "unlock" transfer via a fee on their frontend, for instance).

In other word, seeing your address receiving airdrops on a chain you never used isn't a sign that your private key is compromised (of course, use a cold wallet/ledger, etc)

DrGorilla.eth
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