How to Recover Your Seed Phrase: A Step-by-Step Guide

Mila Mostovaya

Security Guide
How to Recover Your Seed Phrase: A Step-by-Step Guide

“How to recover a lost seed phrase” is one of the most popular Google searches. Why? Because if you lose your seed phrase, you lose access to your crypto wallet — and with it, your assets. Is that terrible? Yes, absolutely. But the good news is we know how to prevent that.

Let’s walk through how to manage your seed phrase in Coin Wallet with our step-by-step guide.

Key Takeaways

  • If you lose your private key, you lose access to one address
  • If you lose the passphrase, you lose everything
  • The security of your assets is your responsibility alone
  • Trust your seed phrase to no one

What Is a Seed Phrase

A seed phrase is a passphrase made up of a random combination of 12 words, separated by spaces, generated from a list of 2,048 possible words. For example: "gallery slam hero calm garden twist salad maple weapon mother fabric coil."

Coin Wallet also supports 12-, 15-, 18-, 21-, and 24-word passphrases from other wallets.

Make sure to store it somewhere secure. Your seed phrase is all you need to access or restore your wallet — even if you forget your PIN. If you lose your seed phrase, you will lose access to your wallet and all the funds in it.

Seed Phrase vs. Private Key

Your seed phrase is the human-readable form of your master private key. It is used to generate all of your individual private keys. With a single seed phrase, you can recover all your wallets, addresses, private keys, and public keys.

A private key is one of the many keys generated from your seed phrase. It is a long string of random characters that corresponds to a single cryptocurrency address. This is what signs transactions and proves that you own the funds.

What to Do If You Lose Your Seed Phrase

Coin Wallet is a non-custodial wallet, meaning we do not store your private keys or seed phrase on any server or in any database. We cannot access your accounts, recover your keys, reset your passphrase, or reverse transactions. Protect your keys — and always double-check that you are on the correct URL.

You are fully responsible for your own security.

Unfortunately, because of this, we are unable to help you recover a lost seed phrase — no one can. If you forget your seed phrase, you lose access to your assets.

How to Store Your Seed Phrase Safely

To avoid losing your seed phrase, follow these simple recommendations.

  • Never share your seed phrase with anyone. If someone has access to it, they can spend your funds. Coin Wallet — like all official services — will never ask for your seed phrase.
  • Store your seed phrase on a physical medium (such as paper or a metal plate) in a secure location, out of reach of unauthorized individuals.
  • Never store your seed phrase digitally — in photos, screenshots, or text files — as this significantly increases the risk of compromise.

There are some seed phrase recovery tools available online today — for example, BTC Recover, BIP39 Recoverer, or OneKey. However, tools like these can also be phishing traps, so you should be very careful when using them.