Glossary · Wallets

HD wallet.

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

Think of it as

One seed, many addresses. Back up the seed once and the wallet can regenerate every key it ever handed out.

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.