Marvin Janssen
November 23, 2023
Seed phrases were a bit of a revolution when they were first introduced. Suddenly, you no longer needed to juggle wallet files to create backups of your precious crypto wallet. Instead, you write down 12 to 24 words on a piece of paper and you are good to go. Seed phrases are almost magical: an incantation that unlocks a wallet containing a virtually unlimited number of addresses and accounts.
How does that work? A seed phrase is more than just a fancy password. The words are taken and put through a so-called key stretching algorithm. The process takes time and effort which makes guessing a lot harder. The final result is what forms the basis of the wallet—the technical term for it is the master extended key. The master key is then used to derive all other keys (private and public) that make up your wallet.
The entire process is deterministic. It means that the same seed phrase always leads to the same master key, which in turn always leads to the same derived keys. It is why, no matter which application or hardware wallet you use, the same crypto accounts always show up. When you create a new account, it simply generates the next address in line. That is why you can create as many accounts as you want even though the seed phrase is only written down once.
TapSafe Recovery is a new kind of backup process for your crypto wallet that does not require you to write down a seed phrase. Instead, it uses a method to split your wallet into pieces, which are then stored on recovery tags and mobile phones. Ryder One uses Near-Field Communication (NFC) to transfer these pieces with a single tap. The main points of TapSafe are to add redundancy and remove a single point of failure.
A serious weakness of seed phrases is that it is all or nothing. If you misplace it and you did not create multiple copies, then your wallet is lost. With TapSafe, you create multiple pieces and can add more later. What makes TapSafe powerful is that you can collect any combination of pieces as long as you reach a predefined minimum number. Compare that to a seed phrase, where the word order is important and a mixup means that you cannot access your wallet.
It can be illustrated by means of an example. When you set up TapSafe Recovery, you have one half on your included recovery tag and another half on your phone. You can also give your friends and family a quarter piece each—completely optional. To recover your wallet in case you lose your Ryder One, all you have to do is to collect enough pieces to make a whole, for example, one half coming from your recovery tag, and two-quarter pieces coming from two friends. You can obviously also set up multiple recovery tags.
How you collect these pieces and in which order does not matter. As long as you recreate a whole, your wallet will always remain accessible. It gives peace of mind knowing that you do not have to worry about the validity or order of your wallet backup. Each individual piece is also a lot less critical because a single one cannot be used to access your wallet. Even with three out of four pieces, nothing is revealed about your wallet. (Cryptographers call this a perfect secret-sharing scheme.) They also do not provide any identifying information about your addresses or what crypto you own. If someone finds a piece, they have nothing to go on, whereas if they find your seed phrase it is all over.
TapSafe Recovery and seed phrases share one important common factor. Remember how the seed phrase goes through a process to generate the master key central to your wallet? TapSafe Recovery follows the exact same process. It means that recovering via TapSafe does not only generates the same wallet you were already using, it is fully compatible with it. You can import your existing seed phrase wallet into your Ryder One, and then create a backup using TapSafe Recovery.
As you can see, TapSafe Recovery brings all the benefits of a seed phrase backup without any of the downsides. With TapSafe you can rest easy knowing that your wallet is safe, both from loss and theft.