What Is A Seed Phrase?

Let's take this slowly. A seed phrase is a set of different unrelated words, which would most likely make no sense even if you tried to somehow make meaning out of it. These sets of words are either 12, 18, or 24 words long, and are provided to users at the initialization of their cryptocurrency wallet. Let's take a look at the following seed phrase:

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As you can see the above seed phrase is 12-words-long, and there is no way you could get something meaningful out of those words. Seed Phrases are extremely important for the safety of your coins, and private keys, and once lost, there would be no way of retrieving your assets.

Speaking of retrieving, remember we said seed phrases are also called recovery phrases? Well, there is a reason for that. Seed phrases could be entered on any other cryptocurrency storage type, and be used for taking back access to one's funds. Imagine you have lost your phone, your laptop is broken, or your hardware wallet has been stolen, you could easily enter the seed phrase on another cryptocurrency wallet, and access your funds at once.

Recovering your assets is easy peasy when you have your recovery phrase at hand, but what if you did not have your seed phrase? We are sorry to say that there is no way of retrieving your life savings, and crypto millions in the absence of a seed phrase, and for that reason, we will provide you with a couple of practices that would help protect your seed phrase and your private keys.

How To Keep The Recovery Phrase Safe?

There are a number of different ways you could go with protecting seed phrases, while they would normally come with their own perks and perils, it is best to choose the one best suited to your needs.

Writing It Down On A Piece of Paper

This one is the most old school, yet the best reliable method out of all others. A paper wallet, as some might call it, is highly unlikely to get hacked, and unless you suspect someone might creep into your house to steal it, it will probably be safe for good. With this method, all you are required to do is to write down all the words presented to you correctly, and with the same pronunciation as on your wallet. You could probably wrap the sheet and put it somewhere safe afterward.

Not Sharing With Anybody

This probably has been stressed a million times already, but just for extra caution, let's go over it one more time; when would you need to share your seed phrase with a stranger?

•    Not when you cannot access your wallet.
•    Not when Your wallet has been hacked.
•    Not when the support team of exchange reaches out to you.
•    Not when you want to receive funds.
•    Not when you would like to send funds.
•    Not on airdrops.
•    Not when on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or any social media.
•    and to keep it short, practically, never.

Storing It on A USB Flash Player

While we would highly recommend you not to store your seed phrase on a mobile, or laptop, it might not be that bad an idea to keep it on a USB. USBs after all, are offline devices that cannot get hacked through online attacks, and unless it somehow gets broken, or lost, they would function just as well as a paper wallet.

Avoid Password Managers

While they are great for managing passwords, developers behind free password managers might find fresh cash more interesting than your work emails, or your YouTube video preferences. Even if the developers themselves would not try, and steal your seed phrase, there is a chance that their databases get hacked, and your seed phrase gets leaked into the vast world of the internet.

Wrapping Up

That was all that could be said regarding seed phrase safety. You might bump into a series of advanced accessories developed exclusively for seed phrase storage, those will work just as fine as the good old paper storage one. But if you would like to treat your seed phrase in a more special way, you might want to give them a look too.