Understanding Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets

How KeepKey Manages your crypto

KeepKey is an “HD” wallet — that’s Hierarchical Deterministic, not High Definition

Almost all other wallets these days are too, and there’s a standard called BIP-32 so they’re all (mostly, I’ll get back to that in a sec) interoperable.

HD wallets have one master private key, and can derive other keys from it according to something called a “path”.

The master key is what you get from your recovery sentence, and you never use it for anything other than deriving child keys.

There’s a particular path for each address you get, generally one per type of coin but sometimes more.

When you make a new account, you’re just telling the device to use a different path, like

.

Unfortunately, different wallets are, for historical reasons, sometimes confused about which paths to use for which accounts. It’s clearly specified in the standard, but the standard was written for Bitcoin and some wallet makers changed things for other coins.

Basically everyone agrees this was a horrible mistake and regrets it, but they can’t fix it because it would mean their older users would wake up one day and not be able to see their funds.

So, for example, Metamask uses

where is the account number, which almost everyone agrees is wrong — but Trezor uses it too, because they want to be compatible with Metamask.

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