Our great sponsors
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
A hierarchical deterministic wallet gets its 32-byte private keys from a "key tree" which it builds from a 512-bit master extended key. (An HD wallet can also build a subset of the tree from a non-master extended key, but that use case is irrelevant here.) Since extended keys are 512 bits long, there can be no more than 2512 unique HD wallets. It's mathematically impossible.
An HD wallet that follows the BIP-39 standard generates its 512-bit master extended key from a seed based on 128, 160, 192, 224 or 256 bits of entropy, which it encodes as a mnemonic for ease of use by human users, and an optional passphrase (additional entropy). The master extended key for a BIP-32 HD wallet is always 512 bits, and the private keys in the key tree are always 32 bytes (256 bits), but adding a passphrase increases the entropy of the seed used to calculate the 512-bit master extended key.