Cardano

What a Trustodian Cardano wallet is, why each one is a separate account, and the Icarus scheme

m/1852'/1815'/{index}'/0/0

CIP-1852, Icarus scheme. The address is a base address: a payment key from role 0, index 0 combined with a stake key from role 2, index 0 under the same account. Addresses begin addr1.

The index varies the account

{index} sits at the account level. Each Trustodian Cardano wallet is a separate CIP-1852 account, with its own payment key and its own stake key.

Trustodian Cardano wallet	Account path	Payment address
1st	m/1852'/1815'/0'	m/1852'/1815'/0'/0/0
2nd	m/1852'/1815'/1'	m/1852'/1815'/1'/0/0
3rd	m/1852'/1815'/2'	m/1852'/1815'/2'/0/0

Most Cardano wallets restore account 0 only. They will show your first Cardano wallet and give no sign that a second exists. If you hold more than one, you need a wallet that can add or enumerate accounts. Eternl can; assume nothing else can until you have checked.

Icarus, not Ledger

Cardano has two incompatible ways of turning a recovery phrase into a root key. Trustodian uses Icarus, the scheme used by Daedalus, Eternl, Yoroi and other software wallets restored from a Shelley phrase.

The Ledger scheme, used by Ledger hardware devices, produces a different root key from the same words, and therefore different addresses at the same path. Some wallets ask which to use when restoring, usually phrased as whether the phrase came from a hardware device.

Restoring under the Ledger scheme gives a valid, empty Cardano wallet with the same words on the same path. If your addresses are wrong and you have ruled out the account index, this is the next thing to check.

How to recover it

Eternl

Including how to add account 1 and above for your other Cardano wallets

Verifying

Match the first receive address of account 0 against your first Trustodian Cardano wallet. If you hold several wallets and only one appears, that is the account-0 limitation above, not a failed recovery. See Troubleshooting.

Vaults

A Cardano vault is a native script under CIP-1854, not an account on this path. No Cardano wallet imports one, so it is rebuilt with cardano-cli instead.

Separately, and this is what matters for backup: the chain holds only a hash of that script, never the script itself. Without the Recovery Kit there is nothing to rebuild from. See Cardano vaults.