Seed Phrase (Recovery Phrase)
The 12–24 words that regenerate every key in your wallet — whoever holds them holds the money, forever.
A seed phrase is 12 or 24 words (from the BIP-39 standard list) encoding the master secret from which a wallet derives all its private keys and addresses. Anyone with the words controls the funds from any device, forever; lose them (and the device) and no company on earth can help.
Iron rules: write it on paper or stamp it in steel — never photos, cloud notes, email, or password managers synced online; store copies in separate secure locations; and know that every request to “verify,” “sync” or “validate” your phrase — from any support agent, site or app — is theft in progress, no exceptions. Most personal crypto losses are seed-phrase failures, not blockchain failures.