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can anyone tell me what the most used derivation paths are? Someone on reddit wrote that coinbase use this path: m/44'/0'/0'/0/0. Do other companies use the same path?

Also do big companies always start generating keys/addresses from account 0 and index 0 aka as on the picture from learnmeabitcoin.com the coin type (is default 0 for bitcoin?), account 0, receiving 0 and key generation from index 0?

My last question is what the "Change" structure is used for? As I understand "Receiving" is for receiving coins but I have no idea what the other one means.

Structure

Julian
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1 Answers1

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BIP44 defines a standard path scheme:

m / purpose' / coin_type' / account' / change / address_index

The BIP defines what coin type, account, change and address index mean. It further specifies that the purpose field is set to 44' when generating addresses and for bitcoin the coin type is set to 0'.

At the time when it was written, the only standard address type was P2PKH (addresses starting with 1). Over the years, more standard derivation paths were added:

  • BIP49: P2WPKH-nested-in-P2SH (addresses starting with 3). The purpose field for these is 49'.
  • BIP84: P2WPKH (addresses starting with bc1q). Purpose field is 84'.
  • BIP86: P2TR (addresses starting with bc1p). Purpose field is 86'.

You can check the website https://walletsrecovery.org/ that maintains a list of wallets and which derivation paths they support. As you can see, modern wallets mostly implement the mentioned standard paths (although apparently the website hasn't been updated for BIP86).

Vojtěch Strnad
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