Seed Phrase

What is Seed Phrase? 

Seed Phrase is a list of 12 to 24 words that crypto wallet users generate for accessing their wallets. In addition, the seed phrase is used to create a list of words that can be used as a recovery phrase for crypto wallets.

People also use the term mnemonic seed or mnemonic phrase to describe the same thing. However, these phrases do not need to be memorized. 

Why Seed Phrases Should be Secure

A crypto wallet has built-in software for generating these phrases, which users must keep safe. In case of a hardware fault, theft, or any other problem, the wallet software can be reinstalled, and the seed phrases can be used to regain access to the wallets (and crypto coins inside). 

Many users opt to keep a copy of their seed phrase offline as it protects it from hackers. However, storing seed phrases on an online device is a significant security risk. Any device online is vulnerable to hackers, and the seed phrase is unsafe in this manner. 

Anyone who knows a wallet's seed can use it to divert funds to another wallet and hack it. This randomly generated string of words is cryptographically extracted from the wallet's private key and paired with 12, 18, or 24 words according to the user's choice. 

The words are chosen from a list of 2048 listed in the BIP39 Wordlist. Starting with Bitcoin, seed phrases can be like: 

“Balance cup hollow figure usual lender fantasy proud act funny vocal kidney”  

Wallet users are asked to write these down and keep them safe. Then, in case of any problem accessing your wallet, you can load these words on any BIP32 compatible wallet and regain access to your wallet. 

The BIP39 Wordlist has 2048 words, which means that a 12-word seed phrase has 128 bits of security. Therefore, an attacker has to run 2128 operations to guess the correct seed. This is a long process in hacking terms. 

Hardware-based wallets can store seed phrases without the high-security risks that online wallets face.