Initial setup with foreign seed

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I right away want to apologize if I ask something silly. The entire Blockchain topic is a bit more complicated than I thought :frowning:

I just installed MetaMask in my browser and got the option to create a new wallet or use an existing seed. As I meanwhile have an app on my smartphone and one on my desktop, I already know the procedure to have all showing the same wallet, so I opted the “i have a seed”.

After entering my seed phrase, the balance was zero. It was then that I realized, that it would not really make sense to enter the seed of a BITCOIN wallet in MetaMask, as this is on a completely different blockchain, thus showing ETH instead.

The wallet that I used as seed is a “Trust Wallet”, potentially keeping different coins, including ETH - but I have none in there. So the zero balance would be expected. Right?

Did I by this operation create a new wallet in the Ethereum Chain with the same(?) fingerprint as the wallet on the Bitcoin Blockchain? Will this cause problems in the future if I ever do cross currency trade? Or is this the expected behaviour, as “Trust Wallet” states that “all currencies share the same seed” anyway?

Since the phrase does recreate the private key out of nothing, could I have connected someone else’s wallet by entering a (valid) phrase that has not been “created” before? There was no hint like “this wallet does not exist, do you want to create it?” or such.

But IF I once fill one of the wallets with ETH, should they show up in both, as “they are the same because they share the same seed”?

Yes, I’m a rookie. :-/

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Hello @smallfreak, welcome to MetaMask community!

You should give yourself more credit, cause you understood most of how things work. MetaMask is a self-custodial wallet that supports only EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible networks at the moment. So by putting the Secret Recovery Phrase ( we call it here ) of your Trust Wallet into your MetaMask wallet when you first initiated it, you will only be able to see EVM compatible networks, each with their own tokens respectively.
If you only had Bitcoin in your Trust wallet (which have their own address to deposit to), then yes, you wouldn’t be able to see it unless it would have been a wrapped Bitcoin residing in an EVM network.

The one thing you were wrong about is that you didn’t create a new wallet on Ethereum Chain, but the SRP holding all the EVM compatible networks and tokens on them of your other wallet was imported into MetaMask that has another organizational structure (1 SRP, multiple accounts meaning addresses and multiple EVM compatible networks on each account having the same address).

Here are a few articles to understand how all of this works. I know they’re not really a few, but they’re very helpful.

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