I have recently been in contact with a developer (Craig Raw) on Github regarding my inability to import an old keystore type electrum.dat file into Sparrow wallet.

https://github.com/sparrowwallet/sparrow/issues/1080

He has been looking into the problem and i have been attempting to inform him of the nature of the keystore aspects of the wallet that fails to import.

Looking through previous releases of Electrum (1.8 - 1.9. which date from around the time (2013) i created the wallet, has shown the seed type in the wallet files to be of an 'old' type, shown as a 32 character alphanumeric string,and the 'seed version' to be 4 in all releases.

However, the wallet i have has a wildly different type of seed in the keystore section of the wallet file - with a varied set of strings joined by plus signs, with an equals sign at the end of it, in a much longer overall string.

The 'seed version' number is also different, being 18.

I'm interested if anyone here can advise as to why my seed and version are so different.