First 4 Letters of a BIP39 Mnemonic Recovery Seed Phrase (2024)

FAQs

What is the mnemonic passphrase of BIP39? ›

BIP39 is a standard that proposed utilizing a mnemonic phrase -- a group of easy to remember words -- to serve as a back up to recover your wallet and coins in the event your wallet becomes lost or destroyed. This is also known as a seed phrase, recovery phrase, wallet back up, etc.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39, or BIP39, is a protocol that was introduced as a means to generate deterministic wallets. It's a method for creating a human-readable mnemonic sentence – easy to read and write – from random data that serves as a backup to recover your wallet.

This is because the first four letters of each word are unique enough to identify the entire word. For example, if your seed phrase contains the word “elephant,” you only need to enter “elep” to recover your wallet.

A seed phrase, also known as a Secret Recovery Phrase (SRP) or mnemonic, is simply a collection of words that allows you to restore your entire crypto wallet. It's those 12-24 English words that your wallet presented you with while setting it up.

Why you shouldn't add a passphrase: A BIP39 passphrase, or a 13th or 25th word, is commonly used with singlesig wallets as an easy way to add a layer of security. However, if you forget or lose your passphrase, you no longer hold the key to your bitcoin, even if you have the original seed phrase card!

can be up to 100 characters long.

The seed phrase consists of 12 to 24 simple words, randomly sequenced from a list of 2048 words. Here is an example of what a 12-word seed phrase can look like: carpet, cat, flower, chair, foot, river, make, image, amazing, three, say, shoe. The seed phrase is generated the first time a user sets up a wallet.

The phrases contain words drawn from a list of 2,048 English words called the BIP39 standard, which the BitPay Wallet and many other leading crypto wallets utilize, offering 128-bit encryption. Most seed phrases are either 12 or 24 words in length, and each is unique to the wallet that created it.

The English-language wordlist for the BIP39 standard has 2048 words, so if the phrase contained only 12 random words, the number of possible combinations would be 2048^12 = 2^132 and the phrase would have 132 bits of security.

The large amount of theoretical wallets make it practically impossible for anyone to guess your seed phrase, not to mention “re-creating” your wallet by sheer accident.

What is a seed phrase mnemonic? ›

A mnemonic seed, also known as a seed phrase or recovery phrase, is a sequence of words that serves as a backup and restoration mechanism for cryptocurrency wallets. Mnemonic seeds typically comprise 12, 18, or 24 words generated by a wallet software or hardware device.

Store it securely offline, like by writing it down on a piece of paper and locking it in a safe place. Don't keep a digital copy on your device—that means don't take a screenshot, write it in your Notes app, or add it to a password manager, for example. The ordering of the words in a recovery phrase matters.

BIP39 is a design implementation that lays out how cryptocurrency wallets create the set of words (or "mnemonic codes") that make up a mnemonic sentence, and how the wallet turns them into a binary "seed" that is used to create encryption keys, which are then are used to execute cryptocurrency transactions.

A Secret Recovery Phrase (also known as a seed phrase or mnemonic) is a series of words generated by your cryptocurrency wallet that give you access to the crypto associated with that wallet. Think of a wallet as being similar to a password manager for crypto, and the seed phrase as being like the master password.

People tend to think that it is easy to guess a seed phrase. However, remember that the possible word list contains 2,048 distinct words. Guessing a 12-word seed phrase in the proper sequence has a probability of 2048 to the power of 12.

A mnemonic passphrase is a separate single word added as extra protection for wallets, serving as an additional security layer. This passphrase acts similarly to a two-factor authentication (2FA) mechanism; even with the mnemonic phrase, this word is essential for accessing the wallet.

The English-language wordlist for the BIP39 standard has 2048 words, so if the phrase contained only 12 random words, the number of possible combinations would be 2048^12 = 2^132 and the phrase would have 132 bits of security.

The passphrase is distinct from your 24-word recovery phrase and is essentially an optional password added to your recovery phrase that provides access to a whole new set of secret accounts. The passphrase protects your crypto assets if your 24-word recovery phrase were to be compromised.

A mnemonic that works forward and backward is “Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle,” which reversed is “Battle Ends And Down Goes Charles' Father.” A helpful learning device to remember the order of keys in relation to the order of sharps and flats is the circle of fifths .