Web3Cryptocurrency Wallet - Seed Phrase Explanation, Importance & Security
Cryptocurrency Wallet - Seed Phrase
Explanation, Importance & Security
The idea of keeping your cryptocurrency wallets safe and protected might be a little intimidating for those who are just getting started in the field. Fortunately, there are several user-friendly cryptocurrency wallets and each one has a quick access backup option that immediately allows you to retrieve your cryptocurrency assets if your wallet device is ever lost or forgotten. A "seed phrase," "seed recovery phrase," or "recuperation seed" is a feature that wallets produce that serves as a passphrase for your personal cryptocurrency information. With these phrases, you can immediately receive your cryptocurrency or NFT’s back.
However, before we go into detail on how to secure your cryptocurrency wallet, you may need to understand what a seed phrase is.
What is a Mnemonic Recovery or Seed Phrase of 12 or 24 words?
In the simplest terms, a seed phrase is a string of unique words that contains all the information required to successfully retrieve your cryptocurrency. Whichever wallet you decide to use will generate a fully unique recovery seed for you, and that software will instruct you on how to store the recovery seed in various ways so that it will be accessible in case of emergency. Typically, 12 to 24 words can serve as the seed phrase, some of which may be precise.
The main purpose of a seed phrase is to have some sort of physical backup in case your wallet malfunctions, allowing you to recover your funds. This applies to any situation when your wallets might become unavailable, such as if your laptop fails, your hard drive becomes damaged, you misplace your smartphone, or your hardware wallet breaks.
Since seed phrases are built using open-source standards that are compatible with the Bitcoin protocol, you can recover access to your cryptocurrency using a variety of different wallets as long as you have your seed phrase.
For instance, if you currently own crypto assets in a specific hardware wallet but it dies in ten years and the company goes out of business, you can access your crypto assets by purchasing a different hardware wallet or downloading it to your phone and entering your seed phrase.
Function of Seed Phrases
Similar to other types of codes, seed phrases function by having each word within the phrase stand for a wallet numerical value. The phrases are mostly created at random using a preset database of words. The ideal option is to let your wallets produce the seed phrase for you even though you occasionally have the option to come up with your own. This is not safe and not worth the effort.
One benefit of seed phrases is that they contain specific, distinct words from the English language that may be understood and recalled regardless of minor errors caused by careless handwriting. This differs from many other randomly generated passwords where each key must be clearly readable in order to successfully reproduce the password as they may only be a string of random characters. Therefore, seed phrases combine the advantages of randomization with those of easily-recognized and frequent words.
How a Seed Phrase Is Used to Secure & Recover Your Wallet
A set of words known as a mnemonic phrase, mnemonic recovery phrase, or mnemonic seed contains all the data required to restore a cryptocurrency wallet. A mnemonic backup phrase may often be generated by wallets and then written down on paper. The user can redownload the wallet software and utilize the mnemonic recovery phrase to retrieve their keys if their machine breaks down or their hard drive becomes corrupt.
Anyone may recover the keys using the phrase; thus, it must be kept secret. Most wallets use mnemonic phrases because they are a great method to backup and store cryptocurrency. A group of words that are simple to remember serves as the representation of a mnemonic recovery seed. As an illustration, consider the following:
The words above represent the following seed:
The words can be identified clearly just from the first four letters. Avoiding words that are similar (such as: build and built) makes recovery seeds unique and safe to secure a cryptocurrency wallet. The majority of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and others utilize mnemonic seeds that range in length from 12 to 24 words. Different length seeds may be used by other cryptocurrency wallets.
Why Is It So Hard to Guess a Seed Phrase
You could assume that it would be simple for someone to guess a string of 24 words or that it would be valuable for someone to program a machine to try various combinations until it cracked a wallet open so they could steal the crypto tokens inside it.
Even a 12-word seed phrase for a Cryptocurrency wallet has 2048^12 combinations, or 2^132, of words since the words for a random recovery phrase or seed are selected from a set of 2048 words. There are many possible combinations given that the galaxy is predicted to contain 10^21 stars. Even if every person on Earth had a million wallets today (not even addresses), it would only total up to 7,800,000,000,000,000 wallets, or about 2^53. This appears to be around half of the possible combinations, but that would conceal the power of the exponential growth.
Even if everyone in the world owned a million bitcoin wallets, we could only use 0.000000000000000000000001654% of the available wallets. That's a lot harder than finding a specific one.
How Important is Seed Phrase Security?
Because anybody with a seed phrase may access a crypto wallet and steal the funds, proper seed storage is essential. If the owner does not save and correctly jot down their seed phrase in the appropriate sequence, they will not be able to recover access if they delete or lose their wallet.
The seed phrase gives anybody who has it access to your crypto assets and also allow you to recover your savings if your wallets are compromised. This is why it's so important to save your seed phrase properly - you need to ensure easy recovery with protection from theft and hacking. Although your seed phrase is merely a group of words, it can be kept and recorded using far more cutting-edge methods then storing a bar of gold, making it considerably more flexible.
Unsurprisingly, hackers and thieves had been putting a lot of effort into figuring out how to get through crypto seed phrase security measures in order to access the crucial information.
Developer John Cantrell was successful in unlocking a cryptocurrency wallet in 2020 by effectively guessing the last eight words of a 12-word seed phrase. Cantrell responded to a challenge on Twitter by logging in as Alistar Milne, who shared suggestions for a 12-word seed phrase along with a wallet containing one Bitcoin.
Cantrell claims that in order to find the right combination to unlock the wallet, he checked a few trillion possibilities of the eight words he knew using cloud computing infrastructure.
In order to take preemptive precautions before hackers have a chance to steal your money, it is becoming more and more important to learn about topics like Cryptocurrency & NFT safety problems. This awareness is important due to the continued rapid growth of the Web 3 movement.
What if I Lose my Seed Phrase?
Without the seed phrase, it is not possible to restore access to a wallet. Not to be confused with your wallet password. The recovery seed, mnemonic seed, seed phrase, and so forth all refer specifically to the 12 to 24 word long "seed phrase". Improve the Storage security of your cryptocurrency & NFT private keys to keep your money safe from thieves, hackers, and other intrusive eyes.
Conclusion
We are all aware of how technologically advanced and sophisticated today's hackers are. With the Blockchain's popularity growing, there have been a number of theft-related occurrences within the last year. But the top two causes of losing access to your Crypto or NFT’s,
- Not being able to access your wallet. Simply not knowing or forgetting your seed phrase, when needed to recover your wallet. This is usually due to a failure to store your seed phrase properly or at all.
- Improper storage of your seed phrase. On a computer, phone, pictures or a notebook. All of these methods are open to hackers or prying eyes.
So please take the knowledge gained from this article and store your seed phrase in a safe manner. A simple amazon search of, proper seed phrase storage will return lots of great options.
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