Restore Brave Browser Crypto Wallets with seed from MEW

Question

I've created a MEW wallet and noted the seed (Mnemonic phrase). After playing around with the Brave Browser and its Crypto Wallets plugin, I tried to restore the account from the seed I received from MEW.

My assumption at that point was (I'm still learning) that the Crypto Wallets plugin of Brave is just another Etherum client, and I could use this one in parallel (as long as I restore the keys with my seed).

To my surprise, the recovery worked well, and "an account" was restored and added to the Brave Browser. However, the account has a different public address and, of course, zero balance.

So there must be a misconception in my head.

Why can I restore with my seed but end up with a different account (public address)?

---

Update 1

Thanks to this answer, I was able to track down an issue on Brave's Github repository, which explains a couple of incompatibilities with other wallets. IMO this explains the confusing behavior described in my post.

Answer 1

Probably the data format they use to restore an account is different, therefore you can only use a Mnemonic phrase to restore accounts on the application it was generated from. For it to be the same account.

If you wish to port a MEW account to Brave or elsewhere, I would suggest you use the Mnemonic phrase in MEW, then save the private key and then export the private key in other applications such as Brave.

Private keys are always the same regardless of the app you are using.

I must caution you though to be very protective of the private key, since once obtained you can lose all funds.