If you are one of those people who has found the whole concept of accounts and wallet addresses difficult to understand, this explanation will make it easier for you to understand how it works.
Imagine that you live in a house and your address is 13 Bridge Street .
If you want to know what this address would correspond to in another language, you can put it into Google Translate and get the translated version in that language.
Below you can see what that address would correspond to in five random languages:
All of those five translations are just different representations of the same address, which is 13 Bridge Street .
Now, if you have an account (the house) in Polkadot.js extension
your public key (the address) could look something like this:
0x46ebddef8cd9bb167dc30878d7113b7e168e6f0646beffd77d69d39bad76b47a
If you want to know what this would correspond to on a specific network, you can change the display of that public key by clicking on the three dots and selecting that network in the extension - just like we used Google Translate to convert 13 Bridge Street into different languages.
If you select Centrifuge Chain, it will display your CFG address (starts with “4”):
If you select Altair, it will display your AIR address (starts with “k”):
If you select Polkadot Relay Chain, it will display your DOT address (starts with “1”):
If you select Kusama Relay Chain, it will display your KSM address (starts with a capital letter):
We have now seen four different representations of the same address and you can change your account to work on every supported network, and the extension will display the address format for that network - but technically, they are all the same address.
But when you want to send funds to your account, you should send them to the correct addresses; so send AIR to your AIR wallet address, DOT to your DOT wallet address etc.
Another way to see all your different representations of your account is to paste either of your addresses on Subscan and it will display them.
