What is a seed phrase, and why does it matter so much?

Hello to all our crypto friends.

We are into the fifth month of 2022 already — the calendar pages go by. Since joining the crypto world a while back, I have learned a great deal and come across a great many questions about hardware wallets.

That is right: the hardware wallet counts as one of the important pieces of equipment for anyone in crypto — and more important still, the seed phrase is the very heart of it. Genuinely the heart.

First of all, what is a seed phrase and where does it come from?

A seed phrase is a set of English words, anywhere from 12 to 24 of them, that the hardware wallet's system generates at random, in order to reach the digital assets stored on it. You come across the seed phrase when you first set up a hardware wallet — on a SafePal, Trezor or Ledger, for example.

So why does the seed phrase matter so much? Why is it the heart?

Over this period I have come across a great many questions from hardware wallet users:

"What do I do if I wrote the seed down wrong?"
"What do I do if I lost the seed?"
"What do I do if the seed got out?"
"Can I recover the seed?"

To begin with, when you run into any of these, the first thing you need is a cool head. Gather yourself. I am keeping calm too.

• The seed cannot be recovered from anywhere except where you wrote it down yourself when setting the device up. Not even the manufacturer knows your seed.
• If you wrote the seed down wrong, what you can do is look at which word is wrong and try comparing it against the words it is likely to have been. I would also suggest that once you have set up and written the seed down, before you start using it, try recovering from the seed to make certain it works.
• If the seed got out or was lost but the funds and the wallet are still there, move the assets out of the wallet tied to that seed as fast as you possibly can — as fast as you possibly can — then factory reset the device to set it up again, write down a new seed and move the funds back in. (And do not lose it or let it out again. My heart cannot take it.)
• If the seed got out or was lost and the assets have already been taken, it is fairly hard to get them back. What you can do is reset both the computer and the hardware wallet, and be a great deal more careful in future.

To gather it all up: if the hardware wallet breaks or is lost, you can take the seed you already have and recover onto a new hardware wallet, because the assets are tied to the seed. That is the heart of it. But if the seed is lost — then it is lost. And that is a lonely place to be.