Term
HD wallet
An HD (Hierarchical Deterministic) wallet derives every private key and address it uses from a single master seed following the BIP-32 / BIP-39 / BIP-44 standards, so a 12- or 24-word seed phrase can back up the entire wallet across many chains.
A Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallet is one whose entire key tree is derived mathematically from a single master seed. The specifications — BIP-32 (deterministic key derivation), BIP-39 (mnemonic seed phrases), and BIP-44 (derivation paths per coin) — became the standard so that one seed phrase can back up any HD wallet across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and hundreds of other chains.
The practical consequence is that you never need to back up individual private keys. Write down the seed phrase once, and you can restore access to every address the wallet ever generated on every supported chain. This eliminated the pre-HD era headache of having to back up each address separately.
Modern software and hardware wallets are almost universally HD. When you install MetaMask, Ledger Live, Trust Wallet, or any modern wallet and it shows you a 12-word phrase to write down, that phrase is the seed of an HD wallet. Different wallets can use different derivation paths, though — a common source of "my seed phrase does not restore my addresses" confusion.
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