Twelve words that are worth exactly as much as everything they control. What they actually are, and where they should live.

Everything else on this site is detail compared with this page. Almost every permanent loss in crypto comes down to a recovery phrase that somebody else read, or one that nobody could find any more.

Three things, in order

The words you get when you set up a wallet are not a password. Understanding what they are makes the storage rules obvious rather than arbitrary.

1. The seed phraseTwelve or twenty-four ordinary English words, in a fixed order. This is the root. Everything below is calculated from it.
2. The private keysDerived from the seed, mathematically. One wallet's seed produces an effectively unlimited number of keys.
3. The addressesDerived from the keys. These are the public part — the strings you share to receive funds.

The arrows only run one way. An address tells nobody anything about the key, and a key tells nobody anything about the seed. But the seed reproduces all of it, on any device, anywhere in the world, in about thirty seconds.

Why it is words and not a file

The word list is standardised — 2,048 English words, chosen so that no two look alike at a glance and none are easy to confuse when handwritten. That is deliberate. The format assumes you will write it down with a pen, because paper does not get encrypted by ransomware, does not sync itself to a cloud account and does not stop working after a firmware update.

It also means the phrase works across brands. A seed from one wallet restores into another that follows the same standard, which is what keeps you from being locked to a single company.

Storing it: the short method

1. Write it by hand, on paperNumbered, in order, in your own handwriting. Check each word twice — a misread word is discovered years later, at the worst moment.
2. Put it somewhere you will still know about in five yearsNot clever, not hidden. The most common failure is not theft; it is a person who cannot remember where they put it.
3. Make a second copy, in a different buildingOne copy is one house fire away from zero. Two copies in two places survive nearly everything realistic.
4. Tell one person it exists and whereNot what it says — that it exists. Otherwise your funds disappear with you, which is a real and common outcome.

The reasoning is simple: all of those are designed to sync, back up and be recoverable. Those are excellent properties for a shopping list and fatal ones for the only copy of your keys.

The passphrase, briefly

Some wallets let you add an extra word of your own on top of the twelve. It produces a completely separate wallet, and it means the phrase alone is not enough to reach the funds.

This is genuinely useful and it doubles what you have to not lose. Forget the extra word and the twelve words open an empty wallet, with no error message and no way to tell that anything is missing. Treat it as an advanced option, and only after the basic version is working.

Metal, and when it is worth it

Paper survives most things, but not fire or flood. Steel plates that you stamp the words into cost about the price of a cheap hardware wallet and remove that failure mode entirely.

Whether it is worth it is a simple comparison: if the amount you are protecting is smaller than the plate, it is not. If it is considerably larger, it is one of the cheapest pieces of insurance available.

The one rule that carries the rest

Nobody legitimate will ever ask to see those words. No support desk, no wallet developer, no exchange, no hardware manufacturer, no helpful person in a chat group. There is no procedure, no emergency and no verification that requires them.

If you hold that one line, and the paper exists in two places, you have removed almost every way this ends badly.