Passphrase

The Passphrase is a security option offered by the best wallets (Trezor, Ledger, etc.) is a tool for experienced users and must be implemented carefully, in practice the Passphrase allows you to increase security in accessing your wallet and also to create hidden wallets.

They are the safest way to avoid physical attacks to your device, when your private key (Recovery SEED) is stolen.

• The Passphrase is not registered on your Hardware wallet.
• It’s made up of ASCII characters, with a distinction between uppercase or lowercase characters, and spaces count as characters, so it can be a single word or a sentence.

How does the Passphrase work ?

When you initialize your Hardware wallet, a mnemonic phrase (Recovery seed) is generated that is saved in the device (encrypted of course), every time you generate a wallet for example a Bitcoin wallet , is derived in this way “mnemonic key+passphrase”.

If you do not set the passphrase the wallet is derived by adding an empty string to your mnemonic key.

Setting the passphrase, to recover your cryptocurrencies you have to enter the recovery seed + the exact passphrase, if you type the wrong passphrase, a new wallet will be generated.

Only by typing the exact combination of recovery seed + passphrase can you access your cryptocurrencies.

As written above the passphrase is not recorded in the device and the responsibility for remembering it is yours alone, so take precautions and save offline a copy of the phrase, like recovery seed if you lose the passphrase is almost technologically and economically impossible to recover.