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Glossary Term

HD Wallet (Hierarchical Deterministic)

A wallet that generates unlimited addresses from a single seed phrase — the standard behind modern crypto wallets.

A hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallet derives an entire tree of key pairs and addresses from one master seed phrase (the BIP-32/39/44 standards). This is why a single 12- or 24-word backup can restore all your addresses across multiple accounts and even multiple coins.

HD wallets improve both privacy and convenience: you can generate a fresh receiving address for every transaction (making on-chain tracking harder) while still backing everything up with one phrase. The practical implication is the one that trips people up — your seed phrase, not any individual address, is your wallet. Lose it and the entire derived tree is gone; leak it and everything is compromised at once.

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