Recovery Phrase

Your recovery phrase is 12 or 24 words the device generates the first time you set it up. These words are the entire wallet. Anyone with these words controls your funds — forever, with no password, no account, and no recovery process.

What the phrase really is

The recovery phrase is not a “backup.” It is not a “password.” It is the wallet itself. The KeepKey device is just a secure way to use the wallet — the words are the wallet.

This has two consequences:

1. If you lose the phrase, your wallet is gone. No one can recover it for you. Not KeepKey. Not ShapeShift. Not Coinbase. Not a court. There is no reset button. Lose the phrase and the funds are gone.
2. If someone else gets the phrase, your wallet is theirs. It doesn’t matter if you still have the device. It doesn’t matter if they’re on another continent. They can type those words into any compatible wallet and drain your funds immediately.

How to store it

Do

• Write it on paper with a pen. Pencil fades; ink lasts. Do this in a private place where no one can watch.
• Check it twice. Misspelled words can render the entire phrase useless. The BIP39 word list has very specific spellings.
• Store it somewhere safe and private. A locked drawer. A fireproof safe. A safe deposit box. Somewhere you trust.
• Consider two copies in two locations. A fire can destroy your only paper copy. But every additional copy is another place it can be stolen from — think carefully about the trade-off.
• Consider a metal backup. Cryptosteel, Billfodl, and similar products let you stamp the words into steel plates that survive fire, flood, and decay.

Don’t

• Don’t type the phrase into any computer, phone, website, or password manager. Every one of these is a potential target for malware.
• Don’t photograph it. Photos sync to iCloud, Google Photos, or a backup drive — suddenly your phrase is in a dozen places you didn’t authorize.
• Don’t text or email it to yourself. Email is plaintext forever. SMS is worse.
• Don’t say the words out loud near smart speakers. Alexa, Siri, and Google Home are always listening.
• Don’t trust anyone who asks for it. Real support people never need your phrase. If someone claims to be from “KeepKey support” and asks for your recovery phrase, they are stealing from you.

If something goes wrong

If your device is lost, stolen, or broken, you can recover your wallet on a new KeepKey (or any BIP39-compatible wallet) by entering the recovery phrase. This is why the phrase exists: the device is replaceable; the phrase is not.

If you suspect someone else has seen your phrase, the safest action is to generate a new wallet on a new device and move your funds to the new wallet as quickly as possible. There is no way to “rotate” a recovery phrase.

Restoring a wallet from your phrase

To put an existing recovery phrase onto a new (or wiped) KeepKey, plug the device in and Vault Desktop will detect that it’s uninitialized. Pick Recover Wallet:

You’ll be asked for the seed length (12, 18, or 24) — match what you wrote down originally — and then walked through PIN setup before reaching the cipher entry.

The cipher

The recovery flow does not ask you to type your seed words directly into the desktop application. That would expose them to your computer. Instead, the device shows a scrambled letter cipher: each keystroke on your keyboard maps to a different letter on the device, and the cipher reshuffles after every key.

The desktop application never sees your real seed words — it only sees scrambled letter positions, which mean nothing without the rotating cipher running on the KeepKey screen. Most BIP39 words autocomplete after 3–4 letters; press the button to accept and move to the next word.

When all words are entered and the checksum validates, the device confirms recovery succeeded:

If the checksum fails — wrong word, wrong order, wrong length — you’ll see an error and can restart from the beginning.

Related

• Onboarding — how the device shows you the phrase
• BIP85 — generating child seeds deterministically from your main phrase
• Passphrase (Hidden Wallets) — adding a 25th-word secret to derive separate wallets from the same phrase