One of the main differences of EOS with other blockchains is the account system. Between your funds and you, there’s an account. A 12 character name. And when you want to spend those funds, you need to sign a transaction for the account, not an associated key directly. Behind the account you can have one or more keys and those are on chain, and you can change those. You can alter them and there’s different permission levels. That’s really awesome. It also means you can do permissions management on your account. -Alexandre Bourget

The default permissions setup

As explained above, EOS has a unique account system, which allows users to manage permissions on their account. Each permission requires a valid transaction, or multiple valid transactions to be transferred to the blockchain. By default, an EOS account has 2 permissions, active and owner.

The active permission authority is used for transferring funds, voting for producers and making other high-level account changes.

The owner permission symbolizes ownership of an account. There are only a few transactions that require this authority, but most notably, are actions that make any kind of change to the owner authority. Generally, it is suggested that owner is kept in cold storage and not shared with anyone. The owner permission can be used to recover another permission that may have been compromised.

By default, the keys for the active and owner both have a weight of 1, and both the active and the owner permission have a default threshold of 1. This means that there is only 1 signature from the owner key required to perform any action that requires the owner permission. The same goes for the active permission. There is only 1 signature from the active key required to perform any action that requires the active permission.

This is how a default EOS account is set up.

Changing and adding permissions

Luckily, you can add and change permissions, allowing you to create a multisignature account, create new permissions and much more. To show you the possibilities of changing and adding permissions we will explain an example.

Multisignature account

In this example we will explain how a multisignature wallet works, and how to set one up yourself.

Taken from the EOSIO Wiki

In the above image you can see a possible setup of a multisignature account. In this example the owner permission has a threshold of 2, and has 2 keys, both with a weight of 1. This means that the signature of both keys is needed to perform any action that requires the owner permission.

The active permission has a threshold of 1, and has 2 keys, both with a weight of 1. This means that only 1 signature of any of of the 2 keys is required to perform any action that requires the active permission.

How to set this up on your own account (toolkit)

Assuming the above makes sense, we will now explain how to setup a multisignature account on your own, using the EOSToolkit by Genereos. We will set up the account just like the multisignature account explained above.

First of all you have to download Scatter, a browser extension. You can get Scatter here. Follow the instructions on how to set up your Scatter account and login to your Scatter extension. After that go to toolkit and connect your existing EOS account.