How To Set Up Multiple Wallet Accounts in Binance Chain Wallet

Binance Chan Wallet is a Chrome browser extension that lets you store your cryptocurrency safely and lets you interact with DEFI exchanges like Pancakeswap. It is the officially supported wallet for coins that use the Binance Chain/Smart Chain. If you have ever set up this wallet, you know that setting it up the first time involves several steps:

1. Click the “create a new wallet” link at the bottom of the first screen.
2. Set a password to use for this wallet
3. Generate the 12 word key seed phrase and write it down (NEVER TAKE A PICTURE OF THIS USING YOUR PHONE! NEVER COPY AND SAVE THIS ON YOUR COMPUTER! WRITE IT DOWN ON A PIECE OF PAPER AND SAVE IT SOMEWHERE, AND/OR SAVE IT IN A PASSWORD MANAGER).
4. On the next screen, it will ask you for a few of the seed words. Enter those and keep going.
5. Your wallet is now set up with a single account (called Account 0).

But what if you have several “accounts” in the real world and you want to store your cryptos separately for each? For example, maybe you have your own regular trading account but you also want to set up a separate account for your young child. Or, suppose you have a self-directed IRA as well as your main account, and you want to trade cryptos in both. You cannot comingle funds between regular and IRA accounts without triggering tax events and penalties. So what do you do?

It turns out that Binance Chain Wallet is a bit confusing in this regard. Fortunately, I went through the exercise of setting this up and figuring out how to do this so you don’t have to.

You might first think that you can just create multiple new wallets with separate logins and that Binance Chain Wallet will let you select which wallet to use. Sadly, Binance Chain Wallet does not work that way. Each time you create a new wallet, that becomes the default wallet in the browser extension, and the prior wallet disappears. Yes, you can import it again (and make it the default wallet again) by typing in the 12 word seed phrase (you DID store that somewhere safe didn’t you?). But you always have only one wallet (the default wallet) to which you can login.

Fortunately, each wallet lets you have multiple accounts. When you first create a wallet, you have “Account 0”. I have not yet found a way to change the name of this account. Fortunately it is possible to create multiple accounts within this wallet. You can name each account whatever you want when it is created, but sadly there seems to be no way to change it after that. So choose the name wisely.

To create a new account click on the “A” at the top right:

That shows you a screen with a menu, one menu item being “Add Account”. Click on Add Account and a popup allows you to set the name of the account. Select a good account name “Junior” or “IRA” or whatever, I suppose even “Account 1” is ok if you remember which is which.

This new account will be in the same wallet, so it will have the same login and the same 12 word seed/recovery phrase. It is just a different account in that wallet so it will have a different wallet address. Each wallet address will have its own set of cypto balances.

Connecting to DEFI Exchanges Like Pancakeswap

Now that you have your separate accounts in one wallet, you can connect either of them to DEFI exchanges like Pancakeswap (PCS). Before you go to the PCS site, you must login to your wallet and then select the account you want to use. To do that, just click on the top right as shown above and that takes you to the main menu. You now have two accounts (or more if you created more) that show on the menu. Just click whichever account you want to use and it will take you back to that home screen shown above. But now the letter shown in the top right is the first letter for whichever account you selected. The main part of the screen will also show you the name and (partial) wallet address for this account, making it easy to verify that this is the account you are now using.

Now just go to the PCS site and connect your wallet. It will connect to the account in your wallet that you selected.

If you forget to select the proper account before connecting your wallet at PCS, just disconnect the wallet, go into your wallet, select the proper account, go back to PCS and connect your wallet again. You will now be connected to the proper wallet account.

Some final notes:

1. If you really want to keep things completely separate, you can of course always create an entirely new wallet. To switch back and forth between the wallets, you will need to import the wallet 12 word seed phrase each time. This is a bit of a pain, but it is doable.
2. If you go with the multiple accounts approach described here, sadly there seems to be no way to either edit the name of an existing account, or to delete an account. If you create 7 accounts named after the Seven Dwarves just to see what happens, you are stuck with those 7 accounts in your wallet forever.

Hopefully someone finds this helpful.