Seed Phrase (Recovery Phrase, Mnemonic)
A list of 12 or 24 words that encodes a wallet's master key; anyone holding it controls the wallet, so it is the one thing you must back up.
- glossary
A seed phrase — also called a recovery phrase or mnemonic phrase — is a human-readable list of 12 or 24 words that encodes the master private key for a wallet. The format is standardized by BIP-39 and is used by most modern wallets (MetaMask, Ledger, Trezor, Rabby, Coinbase Wallet, etc.). With the seed phrase, you can restore the wallet — and any assets in it, including tokenized domains — on any compatible device. Without it, lost device access usually means permanently lost funds, because there is no central authority to issue a "password reset." Best practices: write the seed phrase on paper or a metal backup, store at least two copies in separate physical locations, and never type it into any computer, cloud document, password manager that touches the cloud, chat, or AI assistant. See Recovering a Tokenized Domain After Wallet Loss for the full operational guide.
Related keywords
- recovery phrase
- mnemonic phrase
- wallet backup
- BIP39
- 12 words
- 24 words
- crypto recovery
- Seed Phrase
- what is Seed Phrase
- Seed Phrase meaning
- Seed Phrase definition
Contributors
Namefi is a collective of engineers, designers, and operators who obsess over building tools that make managing your onchain domain names effortless.
Victor Zhou is a technology founder and standards editor focused on digital identity and trust. He founded Namefi, edits Ethereum Improvement Proposals, and previously led smart-contract architecture work at Google Labs.
His work sits at the intersection of naming, ownership, and the systems people use to establish identity online. That perspective makes him especially interested in the way names move between personal meaning, public recognition, and digital infrastructure.
For Namefi, Victor edits and writes about domains as durable digital identity: how names become ownable onchain assets, how tokenization changes custody and trust, and what naming can learn from the systems people use to establish identity online.