HD wallet.

A hierarchical deterministic wallet that derives many keys from a single seed.

Think of it as

One seed, many addresses. The wallet keeps deriving fresh ones so observers can't trace all your spending back to a single source.

In depth

An HD (Hierarchical Deterministic) wallet uses a tree-like derivation path so a single seed phrase produces every key the wallet will ever need. On Cardano the path is m / 1852′ / 1815′ / account′ / role / index, where role 0 is external receive, 1 is internal change, and 2 is the staking key.

Example

Lace can show you "Address 1", "Address 2", "Address 3" … each comes from a different leaf of the same HD tree rooted in your seed phrase.

Next on this path

  1. Seed phrase A short list of words (BIP-39) that encodes every key in your wallet.
  2. Staking key The key in your wallet that controls delegation and reward withdrawal.