A **contract account** is a smart contract deployed on Ethereum that is controlled by the logic of code. Creating a contract account has a cost because it uses resources from the blockchain. A contract account can execute different actions, such as transferring tokens, but it only sends transactions in response to receiving a transaction.

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In Ethereum, the state is made up of objects called "accounts", with each account having a 20-byte address and state transitions being direct transfers of value and information between accounts. An Ethereum account contains four fields:

-The nonce, a counter used to make sure each transaction can only be processed once
-The account's current ether balance
-The account's contract code, if present
-The account's storage 

Ethereum Accounts 

An account  controlled by someone with a private Key, made up of a cryptographic private and public Key, it costs nothing to create one, it can interact with other Externally-owned accounts and smart contracts as well. Only this type of Account can initiate a transaction

Externally-Owned Account

Contract Account

An Ethereum account contains four fields:
- **nonce**: A counter that tracks the number of transactions sent from an externally-owned account or the number of contracts created by a contract account.
- **balance**: The amount of wei owned by the account's address.
- **codeHash**: The hash of the account's smart contract code on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM); this code cannot be changed once deployed.
- **storageRoot**: A 256-bit hash representing the root node of a Merkle Patricia tree, which stores the account's specific state.

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