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Are Ethereum and Oasis wallets that different? I can use the same mnemonics with both, right?

Category: Wallets

Yes, both Oasis and Ethereum wallets make use of the mnemonics as defined in BIP39 and they even use the same wordlist to derive the keypairs for your wallet. However, they use a different signature scheme and a derivation path, so the addresses and the private keys are incompatible.

Here’s a task for you:

  1. Visit https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ to generate a BIP39 mnemonic.
  2. Select ETH token and copy the hex-encoded private key of the first derived account, for example 0xab2c4f3bc70d40f12f6030750fe452448b5464114cbfc46704edeef2cd06da74.
  3. Import the Ethereum-compatible account with the private key obtained above to your Oasis Wallet Browser Extension.
  4. Notice the Ethereum address of the account, for example 0x58c72Eb040Dd0DF10882aA87a39851c21Ae5F331.
  5. Now in the Account management screen, select this account and click on the “Export private key” button. Confirm the risk warning.
  6. You will notice the private key of the Ethereum-compatible account, the hex-encoded address and the very same address encoded in the Oasis Bech32 format, in our case oasis1qpaj6hznytpvyvalmsdg8vw5fzlpftpw7g7ku0h0.
  7. Now let’s use the private key from step 2 to import the Oasis wallet with. First, convert the hex-encoded key to base64 format, for example by using this service. In our example, that would be qyxPO8cNQPEvYDB1D+RSRItUZBFMv8RnBO3u8s0G2nQ=.
  8. Next, import this base64-encoded private key to the Oasis Wallet Browser Extension.
  9. You should see your newly imported account and the Oasis address. In our case oasis1qzaf9zd8rlmchywmkkqmy00wrczstugfxu9q09ng.
  10. Observe that this account address is different than the Bech32-encoded version of the Ethereum-compatible address despite using the same private key to import the wallet with, because of a different signature scheme.

As an additional exercise, you can also create an Oasis wallet using the BIP39 mnemonic from the step 1 above. You will notice that the imported account’s base64-encoded private key in the account details screen is different from the one in step 7 above. That’s because Oasis uses a different derivation path than Ethereum.