Accounts and keys

Seeds

A Zallet wallet can hold multiple mnemonic seed phrases, created with zallet generate-mnemonic or imported with zallet import-mnemonic. Each phrase is an independent root of spend authority, identified by its seed fingerprint (seedfp), and must be backed up independently.

Accounts

Accounts are derived from a seed following ZIP 32 hierarchical deterministic derivation: an account is identified by its seed fingerprint plus a ZIP 32 account index, numbered from zero per seed. Each account is a separate group of funds, and every account adds scanning cost, so create them deliberately — they are not intended as address labels.

Within a Zallet instance, every account also has a UUID, which is how RPC methods identify accounts (account_uuid fields, and account parameters). UUIDs are local to the instance; the portable identity of an account is (seedfp, account index), which is what recovery uses.

This differs from zcashd, where the legacy wallet largely operated as a single implicit account. Zallet still accepts plain account numbers in some methods, but only for wallets with a single seed.

Wallets can also track things that are not derived from a seed: spending keys imported with z_importkey, and watch-only transparent addresses imported with z_importaddress. These become accounts with UUIDs too, but no mnemonic covers them.

Addresses

Addresses are obtained per account with the z_getaddressforaccount RPC method, which derives ZIP 316 Unified Addresses: a single encoding bundling receivers for one or more pools (Orchard, Sapling, transparent). Many addresses can be derived for the same account at different diversifier indices; they all receive into the same account, and payments to their shielded receivers are not linkable on-chain (transparent receivers, when included, do not have this property).