Glossary
Seed phrase
A list of 12–24 words that encodes the master secret of a self-custody crypto wallet, used to back up and restore all of its accounts.
A seed phrase (also recovery phrase or mnemonic) is a human-readable backup of a crypto wallet's master secret, defined by the BIP39 standard. It is usually 12 or 24 words drawn from a fixed 2048-word list, with a built-in checksum so errors can be detected.
Anyone holding the phrase can restore the wallet and spend its funds, so it must be kept private and backed up offline. Because the words encode entropy plus a checksum, a phrase with a missing word or a typo is often recoverable. Learn more in what is a seed phrase.