(Even if you find another wallet that supports bip32, electrum has the ability to add custom words to the seed phrase. I'm not sure other bip32 wallets will accept a 13-word seed phrase.)
BIP32 is about all HD wallets in general, not about the seed phrase. (
and not specific to Electrum's seed)
So If you're comparing wallets' seed phrase, refer to "
BIP39" and "
Electrum Seed Version System" of just "
Electrum seed".
And I have a super duper question: what if, purely theoretically, the electrum team stops supporting the project, or for any other fantastical reason, its servers crash FOREVER - will I be able to restore the BTC balance using the seed phrase in some other wallet?
If you're looking for other wallets that can restore it, Blue wallet can.
Other wallets support the importation of Electrum wallet files.
And if any copy of those wallets somehow cease to exist in the future (
that wont happen): Electrum's seed phrase is well documented in this very forum or other websites
that with info alone, you can still find a way to derive your master private key from your seed phrase. (
if you can do some coding or with the help from future AI)
Internet and servers has to cease to exist for those to be wiped entirely.
To give you some details: its derivation is not much different from BIP39.
It differs much on how it generates the seed phrase and check for validity (
which can be skipped if you want), derivation however, is almost identical.
The only major difference when calculating the binary seed from the mnemonic is the default/prepended salt "
electrum" instead of "
mnemonic".
So even those software that support BIP39 can easily be tinkered to support Electrum seed (
IanColeman's BIP39 tool for example).
