Ethereum vanity address is a one-of-a-kind customized address that has portions of it chosen rather than being created at random.

Why would you create a vanity address?

First of all, it looks cool. The second thing it can help you with is to reinforce your brand and make you more noticeable.

How to generate your own vanity address?

Creating a vanity address is a straightforward trial-and-error process. When performing high-risk cryptographic operations, such as private key creation, it is important to use trusted and audited tools.

The best thing is to run generator software on a secure machine that is not connected to the internet. One example of the tool you can download is - https://github.com/10gic/vanityge

You can also use online tools like VANITY-ETH. It’s less secure since PK is generated in the browser. Vanity-ETH is an open-source tool using your web browser to generate Ethereum vanity addresses - https://vanity-eth.tk.

Enter the prefix/suffix of your choice, and click ‘generate’. Your browser will generate lots of random addresses until one matches your input. Once an address is found, you can reveal the private key, or click the 'save' button to download a password-encrypted keystore file.

How long does it take to generate an address?

The time to generate an address depends on how long is the desired prefix/suffix.

A popular vanity address is 0x000000000000000000000000000000000000dead (with 'dead' at the end), used instead of the default NULL address. Generating the private key for this address would take thousands of years.