Unorthodox problems often require unorthodox solutions, and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the still nascent world of blockchain tech. The ShapeShift team faced the issue of interfacing with wallets from a variety of vendors, as a solution we built and open-sourced it to the community.

Take a moment to read about the problem we faced that prompted this design, and how our HDWallet solution works. We hope you enjoy.

Find our developer resource page here: pages.shapeshift.com/developer-portal

The Problem

Applications that want to interface with multiple wallets need to build an integration to each wallet. This means for every call you want to make, such as getting an address or signing a transaction, you have to write new code for each wallet.

We ran into this problem while building the new ShapeShift Platform, our interface for buying, trading, tracking, and hodling crypto assets across multiple hardware wallets.