A lil technical insight into your crypto wallet
Do you remember those 12 randomized words when you first created your wallet? Those are called your seed phrase, but you probably know that. The entire crypto industry keeps telling you to never give anyone your seed phrase, or “not your keys, not your coins.”
These 12 words look a lot like “backup codes” some websites might hand you. I don’t know about you, but when I first started out, I was afraid those 12 words are only valid in this particular wallet app, because they seemed like the already familiar backup/recovery codes. But they aren’t. In fact, these 12 words are accepted by virtually any crypto wallet in existence; be it MetaMask (EVM/Ethereum-like), Binance Wallet (BNB/BSC), XDefi (EVM+), Solflare (Solana), Keplr (Cosmos), or Leap (also Cosmos). Your seed phrase works everywhere.
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What I wish they had told me before is that these 12 words are generated based on a widely adopted standard originated from the Bitcoin community: BIP39, the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal #39 which standardizes mnemonic seed phrases based on wordlists. While many different word lists are possible, typically we use a single English word list with very particular properties — but that’s a bit too much for here.
What matters is that BIP39 goes together with 2 other such standards: BIP32 (Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets, aka HD Wallets) and BIP44 (Multi-Accounts for HD Wallets). All 3 of these BIPs precisely define how any wallet can go from seed phrase to arrive at the exact same private key.
This means you can use the seed phrase you generated with Keplr in Leap and have two wallets access the same funds! Technically, accessing wallets is NOT standardized yet. There is to date no widely adopted library for accessing the different wallets — especially across different ecosystems like Cosmos vs. Solana. Some dApps may not even support your wallet despite being on the same blockchain as other dApps you frequently use. So having options is certainly nice. But no matter what, protect your seed phrase!
As a small addition: the address your wallet shows is NOT your public key — it is derived from your public key. The public key is actually also the same across wallets as your private key, but how the address is derived is only standardized per ecosystem: All EVM blockchains use the same algorithm, so your address across different EVM blockchains (Ethereum, BSC, Arbitrum, …) will always be the same; Bitcoin actually supports multiple address algorithms; and Cosmos uses a similar algorithm as EVM, with the addition of Bech32 on top of it.
So while your address may be different, your underlying keys are still the same!
