In the creation process of the native wallet provided by Brave there is only ONE seed phrase requested to backup but then, when I open the wallet I see there are multiple chains (which is great) but I was wondering how is that ONE seed phrase was provided when I can use Ethereum, Solana and Filecoin.
I understand thar for all the EVM compatible chains the seed phrase can be the same as the Ethereum one. But how is that Solana and Filecoin share a seed phrase with Ethereum?
I hope I am being clear so you can sort out my question.
This is the expected and desired behaviour, which we are able to achieve thanks to a decade-old cryptographic trick pioneered by Bitcoin called BIP32.
The seed generated by Brave Wallet during onboarding is the master seed, and we deterministically derive unique internal private keys for each cryptocurrency (Ethereum, Solana, Filecoin), and furthermore, for each account. This technique is chain-agnostic, and forward-compatible, meaning that when we add Bitcoin support in Brave Wallet, you won’t be required to create a new seed.
You’re right that EVM compatible chains share the same private key, but we have mechanics in place to prevent the signature on one EVM chain from being used in another one.
If you want to read more about this, you can try searching for “HD Wallets” (there are plenty of great resources on YouTube).
This is awesome! Thanks for your response and thanks for the insights and information to deep diver in this topic.
I have a question now; lets say I backup the master seed but I dont backup the internal seed of any of the supported chains, will I be able to restore one of those internal addresses using other wallet that is not Brave Wallet?
If you can provide me more insights for me to research I will be very grateful, this topic is quite interesting to me.
Yes, totally. The keyword to focus on is “deterministic”. As long as you have your master seed (represented by the 12/24 words recovery phrase), we’ll know exactly how to derive the internal private keys for each of your accounts and blockchains. The derivation mechanism is a public standard, which means you can safely migrate to other wallets permissionlessly and retain full access to all the blockchains you previously used on Brave Wallet. One of the things I love about self-custodial crypto wallets!
Also wanted to mention here that it’s possible to export the internal private key for a specific account, if you’re not willing to migrate your full master seed to another wallet.