Seed Phrase News

A seed phrase is a mnemonic code of 12 to 24 words used to recover one’s cryptocurrency wallet. It is also known as a backup phrase, recovery phrase or mnemonic sentence and serves as the cornerstone of most modern crypto wallets and the crypto sphere at large. Therefore, it is crucial that the seed phrase be chosen at random to prevent guessing or reverse engineering. Compared with seed phrases containing fewer words, those with more words have more entropy/randomness.

Entropy generation is the first step in the process of creating a seed phrase. The checksum is then produced by passing the entropy through a hashing function — notably, SHA256. After that, a portion of the checksum is added to the random data. The output is then split into 11-bit chunks, each corresponding to a single word on the BIP39 word list.

With a few rare exceptions, most current wallets will generate a seed phrase upon the creation of a wallet. Unfortunately, there aren’t many ways to customize the seed phrase’s settings, as the process is often automatic. However, users can use a calculator or dice to generate a seed phrase offline.