Firstly, the private key is essentially a true random number. Stored as a byte array in a computer. The private key of EOS is different from Ethereum, but it's more similar to Bitcoin's private keys. However, there are some differences between the EOS private key and Bitcoin's as well.
The Ethereum private key is a hash of random numbers so that the Ethereum private key is a hexadecimal with 64 strings. Bitcoin is a WIF (Wallet Import Format) encoding format. In fact, in Ethereum and Bitcoin, the private key has two main roles:
- The private key generates the public key, thus deriving the transaction address
- The private key lets you authorize transactions
For EOS, the private key is used to generate transaction signatures, not to generate transaction addresses. Because EOS introduces the concept of an account, the EOS account is similar to the ENS domain, so the EOS transaction address is not derived from the private key.
Here take an example of the EOS private key:
5KcryqKESci1TJbW4bsSVRStdcPRdqmJets1f9G225iqW3KBfEC
Note: The first string of the private key in WIF format starts with "5", "K" or "L"