Storing your seed phrase
Last reviewed: August 2026
In one line
Your seed phrase is the 12 or 24 words your wallet showed you the day you created it. They're the backup of your entire wallet: whoever has them can move your money from any phone in the world, and if you don't have them written down anywhere, nobody can give them back to you.
| If you're here because… | Go to |
|---|---|
| You never wrote them down and the app still opens | Get them out today — you've lost nothing |
| You lost the paper, it got soaked, or someone saw it | What happens if… |
| You want to write them down properly, once | Paper, then metal |
Why is it so critical?
Because it isn't a password. A password protects an account somebody administers, and that person can reset it for you. Here there is no account and no administrator: the words are the wallet. Whoever types them into any app in the world opens yours — no password, no PIN, no 2FA, and even if your original phone no longer exists.
From that come the only two rules that matter: nobody else sees them, and you don't lose them.
If you never wrote it down, do it now
A lot of people create a wallet, tap "I'll do it later" on the screen with the words, and keep using it for months. If that's you: as long as the app is still installed and you can get in, you haven't lost anything. The seed phrase is still in there and you can look at it whenever you want.
It's under Settings, in the security or backup section:
| Wallet | Where to look | Official guide |
|---|---|---|
| Trust Wallet | Settings → your wallet → manual backup | trustwallet.com |
| Phantom | Settings → Security & Privacy → show recovery phrase | help.phantom.com |
| MetaMask | Settings → Security and password → reveal secret phrase | support.metamask.io |
| Rabby | Settings → your address → back up seed phrase | support.rabby.io |
Any other wallet that gave you 12 or 24 words has the same option under a different name: look for "backup" or "recovery phrase". It will ask for your PIN, password or fingerprint before showing it — that's normal, it's the app checking it's you.
The "copy" button is convenient and it's the classic mistake
What you copy sits on the clipboard, which other apps can read and which on several phones syncs to your computer. That's exactly the path you want to avoid. Write it by hand, reading it off the screen.
If the app no longer opens, that door is closed
You uninstalled the wallet, the phone was lost, you wiped the computer, or you deleted the browser profile: then there is nowhere left to get the words from. Nobody has a copy — not the wallet's support, not whoever wrote it, not us. The seed phrase was generated on your device and never existed on any server, which is exactly what makes it secure and also what makes it unrecoverable. That's why this gets done today, not the day you need it.
Absolute rules
NEVER do this
- ❌ Photo or screenshot of the seed phrase
- ❌ Store it in a text file
- ❌ Store it on Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox
- ❌ Send it over email, WhatsApp, Telegram
- ❌ Store it in a cloud-based password manager
- ❌ Enter it on any website
- ❌ Share it with anyone (not support, not family, not "experts")
That last one costs the most money: nobody from "support" writes to you first, and whoever does is scamming you. What those messages look like: Spotting scams.
Why not digital?
Because a file gets copied without you noticing. A paper in a drawer has to be physically fetched; a .txt in the cloud can be read by anyone who gets into that account, from the other side of the world, and you won't notice a thing. And screenshots are the most treacherous case: they sync to the cloud on their own the moment you take them.
Basic method: Paper
Step 1: Materials
You need paper that will last — not a post-it — a pen (pencil fades on its own over the years), and ten minutes alone. That's all.
Step 2: Write it down
Write each word, numbered, in the order the app shows it to you. When you're done, read them back twice: once for spelling, once for order. That extra minute is what saves you from the problem nobody catches in time.
| 1. abandon | 4. about | 7. abstract | 10. access |
| 2. ability | 5. above | 8. absurd | 11. accident |
| 3. able | 6. absent | 9. abuse | 12. account |
Numbered and in order. The order is part of the secret.
Step 3: Verify
Writing one word down wrong is the mistake nobody discovers until it's too late, so it's worth checking the same day. How, depending on what you have:
- Hardware wallet: use the feature it ships with — Check backup in Trezor Suite, the Recovery Check app on Ledger. The device compares what you type against the seed it already holds and tells you whether it matches. Nothing leaves the device.
- Software wallet: install the same app in another browser profile or on another phone, restore there from your paper, and check that the first address is identical to the one in your wallet. If it matches, you copied it correctly. Then uninstall that second copy.
Only in the official app, and only from the paper
This is the one moment you'll ever type your words, and it's exactly the gesture phishing imitates. Type them only into the app you downloaded from the official site, never into a web page, never into a "verification tool".
Step 4: Store it
Keep it at home, somewhere safe from water, from fire and from visitors. Any old drawer already beats nothing; a safe is considerably better.
Step 5: Backup
When you're done, make a second complete copy and store it in another physical place — why two and not more is further down. A trusted person's home works (in a sealed envelope), so does a bank safe deposit box, or another property you own. The only thing that matters is that one fire or one burglary can't take both.
Advanced method: Metal
Paper burns, soaks through, and fades over the years. If the backup has to outlast a couple of house moves, it's worth putting it on metal:
| Option | Material | Price range |
|---|---|---|
| Commercial plates (Cryptosteel, Billfodl and similar) | Stainless steel | Tens of dollars |
| Titanium plates | Titanium | Somewhat more expensive |
| DIY: stamped washers | Stainless steel | A few dollars |
Any of the three survives a house fire, which is the point. The difference between them is convenience, not security.
DIY method with washers
- Buy stainless steel washers
- Buy a letter punch set
- Stamp the first 4 letters of each word
- String them onto a bolt in order
Your words come from a fixed list of 2,048 (the BIP39 list, the standard almost every wallet uses). The English and Spanish lists are built so that no word shares its first four letters with another, so stamping four is enough to reconstruct it unambiguously:
| Full word | What you stamp |
|---|---|
| abandon | ABAN |
| ability | ABIL |
Recovering on a device, the prefix is enough: the screen autocompletes. An app may ask for the whole word, so keep the list too — search for "BIP39 wordlist", and it comes printed with several commercial plates.
Where to store it: the safe
A metal plate inside a safe is the simplest long-term storage that exists. Two details decide whether it works or not:
A safe you can carry away is not a safe
The typical theft isn't opening it on the spot: it's taking it and opening it later, at leisure. Make sure it's anchored to the floor or wall, or heavy enough that it can't be moved. If it's also fireproof, even better.
Don't store the plate next to the hardware wallet
If the device and the seed phrase are in the same drawer, a single theft takes both — and the seed alone is already enough to drain you. Keep them apart: the device where you use it, the backup where nobody sees it.
And don't tell anyone that the safe has crypto inside. The risk stops being digital the moment someone knows there's money in there.
Splitting the seed phrase: almost always a bad idea
There's a method going around that involves splitting groups of words into separate envelopes: words 1 through 8 in one place, 5 through 12 in another, and so on. It sounds clever.
Don't use that method
Whoever finds just one of those parts knows 8 of your 12 words, and knows them in their exact position. The missing 4 come from a public list of 2,048 words.
That leaves roughly 10¹² valid combinations after the checksum. It's expensive brute force, but perfectly feasible if the prize justifies it.
You're not splitting the secret: you're leaking two-thirds of it in each copy, and tripling the number of places it can be stolen from.
If you genuinely need to spread the risk, there's exactly one correct way to do it:
Multi-share Backup, formerly Shamir Backup (SLIP-39)
It splits the seed cryptographically into N parts, of which you need M to reconstruct it (for example, 3 of 5).
The difference from the homemade method is total: with fewer than M parts, you get zero information about the seed. Not "less information": none.
The Trezor Safe line supports this natively. In Trezor Suite it's no longer called "Shamir": look for Multi-share Backup.
Shamir splits the backup; multisig splits the signature
With Shamir, at recovery time, the complete seed gets reassembled on a single machine: for a moment there's once again a single point of failure. A multisig splits the signature instead, so no device ever has enough to move the money on its own. They're complementary.
For everyone else
Two complete copies in two different physical locations. It's more secure than any homemade splitting scheme, and far simpler.
The real risk isn't the one you think
For 99% of people, the danger isn't having the seed phrase stolen from your home. It's losing it: a fire, a move, a piece of paper that got misplaced. Optimize for that.
Extra protection: Passphrase
Some wallets let you add a passphrase: an extra piece of text you choose that gets combined with your words. It's known as "the 13th word" or "the 25th", but it is not a word from the list — it's any text at all, and every character counts, including capitals, spaces and symbols.
| What you enter | The wallet that opens |
|---|---|
| Your 12 words, no passphrase | Your usual wallet |
Your 12 words + coffee with milk | A different wallet, empty |
Your 12 words + coffee with Milk | Another one, also empty — with no warning |
Advantage: even if your seed is stolen, without the passphrase they can't reach the real wallet.
A wrong passphrase doesn't throw an error
There is no such thing as an incorrect passphrase: every string opens a different, valid wallet. Get one letter wrong and the wallet doesn't warn you — it shows you an empty account, as though you never had anything. People who "lose" funds to a passphrase almost always still have them, behind a string they remember wrong.
If your balance shows zero, check capitals, leading or trailing spaces, the keyboard layout, and whether you typed the PIN by mistake. And write the passphrase down as carefully as the words, somewhere else — keeping them apart is the entire point.
What happens if…
Almost everything that sounds frightening has a fix. It's worth knowing which is which, because the difference between "a scare" and "it's over" is nearly always the same thing: whether a copy of the words exists.
| Situation | What it actually means |
|---|---|
| You lost the paper and you have another copy | A scare. Redo the missing copy and get on with your day. |
| You lost the only copy, but the app still opens | You haven't lost the money. Go look at it in the app and write it down again, today. |
| You lost the only copy and the app no longer opens | The funds are locked forever. There's no support line and no claim to file. |
| The paper burned or got soaked | Same as losing it — and it's the reason for metal plates and for two copies in two places. |
| Someone saw or took your paper | The one emergency with a clock on it. See below. |
| Your locked phone was stolen | They need your PIN or fingerprint to open the app. Restore your wallet on another device with the seed phrase and, if in doubt, move the funds to a new wallet. |
| It was taken unlocked, or out of your hand | Treat it as though they saw your words: new wallet, move everything, now. See the notice below. |
| You typed them into a website, or gave them to "support" | Same: new wallet and move everything immediately. What those sites look like: Scams. |
| You restored and the balance shows zero | A scare, almost always. The app is usually looking at a different address path, not that the money is gone. Paste your old address into an explorer: if the funds are still there, they're there. Look for "derivation path" or "wallet type" in the app and try the other options. |
| You forgot the app's password | The password is local only. You reinstall and restore with the seed phrase. |
| You deleted the app by accident | Same: reinstall and restore. The wallet doesn't live in the app. |
If someone else saw your words, there's only one correct reaction
Create a new wallet, with a new seed phrase, and move everything there right away. Changing the app's PIN or password does nothing: the seed phrase works without them, from any phone in the world. As long as the funds stay in the old wallet, they're one step away from whoever saw the paper.
Read the whole table and one conclusion is left: the seed phrase fixes everything else, and nothing fixes not having it.
Long-term scenarios
"What if I die?"
Consider leaving instructions for your heirs — instructions, not the words:
- A sealed letter with a notary or a lawyer, saying where the backup is and what it is, without containing the seed phrase
- Stored somewhere other than the backup: if the letter and the words end up in the same safe deposit box, you separated nothing
- A multisig where an heir holds one of the keys: they can't touch anything alone, but can recover funds with you absent
Don't give the seed phrase directly, give instructions on how to find it.
"What if I lose my memory?"
Keep several copies in different places, write down where they are (without the words on that note), and make sure at least one person you trust knows the backup exists. They don't need to know what it says — only how to find it.
Security checklist
Check it off as you complete each step. It's saved in your browser.
Summary
- The seed phrase is total control — protect it as such
- If you never wrote it down and the app still opens, get it out today; if the app no longer opens, there's nowhere to get it
- Never in digital format
- Write it on paper, consider metal for the long term
- Two complete copies in different locations
- Anchored safe, and never next to the hardware wallet
- Don't split the seed across envelopes — that leaks the secret instead of protecting it
- If the amount justifies it: Shamir or multisig
- Have a plan for emergencies and inheritance
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