How do seed phrases work? What makes TapSafe recovery safe without a seed phrase?

 What is a Seed Phrase? 

Seed phrases sparked a small revolution when they first appeared. You no longer had to juggle wallet files just to back up your crypto. Instead, you write down 12 to 24 words on a piece of paper, and you’re good to go. Seed phrases feel almost magical—an incantation that unlocks a wallet with a virtually unlimited number of addresses and accounts.

How Does A Seed Phrase Work?

A seed phrase is more than a fancy password. Software takes the words and runs them through a key-stretching algorithm. This process deliberately consumes time and computational effort, making guessing dramatically harder. The output forms the foundation of the wallet, technically known as the master extended key. From this master key, the wallet derives every other key, both private and public.

The entire process is deterministic. The same seed phrase always produces the same master key, which always produces the same derived keys. That’s why the same crypto accounts appear no matter which app or hardware wallet you use. When you create a new account, the wallet simply generates the next address in sequence. This design lets you create unlimited accounts while writing down the seed phrase only 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.

Common Weaknesses of Seed Phrases

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.

Example using TapSafe Recovery Method on Ryder One 

When you set up TapSafe Recovery on your Ryder One, 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 Phases: What's the Common Factor?

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.

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