From my point of view, a necessary requirement for a cryptocurrency wallet, from my point of view, is user independence from the developer. I am only willing to use wallets that preserve my ability to control my assets even if the wallet servers go offline and the developers stop maintaining the application.
In L1, this problem is relatively straightforward. Before using a wallet, you can check which derivation paths it uses. If this information is available, you can either find other wallets that support the same derivation paths or, if no such wallets exist, derive private keys from the seed phrase using those paths via Ian Coleman, and then import those private keys into a wallet that supports direct key import (for example, Blue Wallet).
In L2, things are not that simple.
In the Lightning Network, for example, very few wallets actually restore access to funds purely from a seed phrase. Phoenix is one of the few that can do this in principle, but I still remember a case when I could not restore access after reinstalling Phoenix on another device, and it turned out that the Phoenix seed phrase from Android was not compatible with Phoenix on iOS. Restoring funds via another developer's wallet is practically out of the question.
That said, a few years ago I noticed that three wallets built on Greenlight (Blockstream Green, Blitz, Relai) could interpret each other's seed phrases and even display transaction history. Although they still did not allow full control over funds created in another wallet (they only provided history access), this suggests that interoperable wallets are at least possible within the Greenlight architecture. However, two of these three wallets (Blitz and Relai) no longer use Greenlight, and in any case, they did not provide full user independence. If Greenlight servers go down, access to funds is still lost.
With other L2 systems, things should in theory be easier. But in practice, mismatches in backup formats still exist, and I do not have a clear framework for handling them. That is why I propose collectively building a database of L2 wallets whose backups are compatible with each other.
This topic was motivated by my
experience with the Layerz wallet.
I have started collecting information on cross-wallet backup compatibility and would like to share it here, while also hoping others can help extend it.
Here is what I have so far:
Liquid NetworkAqua, Blockstream App, SideSwap - compatible with each other
Layerz, Bull - compatible with each other
SparkBlitz, Cake - compatible with each other
Layerz - not compatible with any other wallet
BarkNoah, Arké, Alby Hub - compatible with each other
ArkadeArkade.Money, Chimera Wallet - compatible with each other if you import a private key
Arkade.Money, Layerz - compatible with each other if you import a seed phrase
Lendasat, Bitboard - compatible with each other
Arksat - not compatible with any other wallet
RootstockEnkrypt, Exodus, Bitget Wallet, SafePal and a lot of multichain EVM wallets - compatible with each other
If you have information about other wallets and how their backups are interchangeable, please share it and I will add it to the first post. I think this database could be very useful for users across different L2 protocols.
