What is the status of hierarchical deterministic wallets (BIP32)

BIP32 specifies hierarchical deterministic wallets, where a master seed fully determines a whole tree of keypairs that can be arbitrarily branched. It also introduces the notions of internal and external keypair chains that can be used independently to generate public or private keys.

Now I know that for example Armory uses deterministic wallets, but I cannot seem to find any implementation of the branching feature as described in BIP32. In particular, I want to generate a chain of linked addresses which are spendable using only one of the keys from my wallet as seed of a new branch (roughly the use case described in Recurrent business-to-business transactions).

Are there any other implementations of BIP 32 I am not aware of? Are there any plans to (fully) implement BIP 32 in Armory or any other client?

Noah

Posted 2012-10-06T15:42:55.893

Reputation: 1 369

Absolutely none of the HD wallets are compatible with any of the others. Check the 'mnemonic compatible' tab in this spreadsheet: https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=584F122BA17116EE!313&app=Excel

– Chloe – 2017-05-22T14:27:51.787

Answers

I started implementing BIP32 for the reference client myself, but as there were more urgent matters to deal with, I have temporarily stopped working on it. I certainly plan to complete this, but I can't give any target date or version right now.

As far as I know from Alan Reiner (Armory's developer), he plans to switch to BIP32 as soon as the reference client implements them as well.

Pieter Wuille

Posted 2012-10-06T15:42:55.893

Reputation: 54 032

The list is growing: Mycelium, Greenaddress.it, BitGo.com and of course Trezor now support BIP32. (Electrum 2.0 and Multibit HD are both in beta, but will also support BIP32 and Trezor)

– Jonathan Cross – 2015-02-15T03:27:57.660

Update: Electrum and MultibitHD are now using BIP32. – Jonathan Cross – 2015-09-17T16:43:19.803

1MultiBit is also planning to support them once other more pressing problems are out of the way. – Gary Rowe – 2012-10-07T11:18:29.737

Great to hear, Gary. I'll try to get at least some test vectors in the specification soon, so implementations don't need to wait for each other to be sure to be compatible. – Pieter Wuille – 2012-10-07T11:39:29.883

The Electroid: Electrum for Android - Native Edition[1] project will have BIP 0032 support, at least with a basic implementation, but intending to mirror Electrum (the desktop version) with its version.

As a side-effect of the Android development, a Java library will be developed to at least minimally support the Android client, but with the intention to stay independent and not mix ANY client/UI details... that way it can be used outside of the client and be easier to test without worrying about UI details.

1: http://e4a-ne.blogspot.com

harningt

Posted 2012-10-06T15:42:55.893

Reputation: 111