What is a seed phrase?

Twelve or twenty-four words that are the wallet itself. Whoever has them has the coins, from anywhere, forever.

A wallet does not store coins. It stores a key, and that key is generated from a list of ordinary words — twelve or twenty-four of them, in a fixed order.

From those words, every address and every private key in the wallet can be regenerated, on any device, in any wallet app. That is why they restore access when a phone is lost, and equally why they hand over everything to anybody who reads them.

Three consequences follow, and they are the whole of wallet security. Write them on paper, because a copy in a photo, a note app, a password manager or an email is a copy in whatever gets compromised. Never type them anywhere except when creating or genuinely restoring a wallet. And accept that there is no reset — lose them and lose the device, and the coins stay visible on the chain and permanently unreachable.

Keys and seed phrases is the full version.

Last checked 19 Oct 2026.