HD Wallet Derivation

Explore BIP-32/44 hierarchical deterministic wallet derivation paths and view the resulting public keys and addresses.

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How It Works

Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets use a single master seed to generate an entire tree of cryptographic key pairs. This is defined in BIP-32 and organized into a standardized path structure by BIP-44.

BIP-44 Path Structure

m / purpose' / coin_type' / account' / change / address_index

The apostrophe (') denotes hardened derivation, which uses the parent private key directly. This prevents a compromised child key from exposing the parent. Non-hardened (normal) derivation uses the parent public key, enabling watch-only wallets.

Key Derivation Process

1. Mnemonic → Seed — The BIP-39 mnemonic is converted to a 512-bit seed using PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 (2048 iterations).
2. Seed → Master Key — HMAC-SHA512 with key "Bitcoin seed" produces a 256-bit private key and 256-bit chain code.
3. Parent → Child — Each path level derives a child key using HMAC-SHA512 with the parent chain code as key.
4. Private Key → Public Key — Elliptic curve multiplication on secp256k1 produces the corresponding public key.
5. Public Key → Address — Chain-specific hashing (Keccak-256 for ETH, Hash160 for BTC) produces the final address.

Common Derivation Paths

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