Recovery Phrases

What the phrase actually is

A recovery phrase is the seed your wallet expands into your private key. On Valdium it's a sequence of 24 English words drawn from the BIP-39 wordlist. The words encode 256 bits of entropy plus an 8-bit checksum; the wallet feeds those bytes through HKDF-SHA256 to produce the deterministic seed for Dilithium3 key generation.

Three things follow from how it's built. First, the phrase is the wallet — the keypair is a pure function of those 24 words and the derivation path. Second, anyone who has the phrase has every account it derives. Third, the wallet cannot recover it for you. There is no email reset, no support ticket, no signed affidavit that gets you back in.

Why 24 words instead of 12

BIP-39 specifies both 12-word (128-bit) and 24-word (256-bit) phrases. We standardized on 24 across every Valdium wallet because Dilithium3 itself is a 192-bit-security signature — pairing it with 128-bit seed entropy would create a weakest-link gap. 256 bits of seed entropy is overkill against any classical adversary and the right ballpark against a quantum one, which is the entire reason Valdium exists.

How to back it up

The right answer is paper. Specifically: write the phrase on paper, in the order shown, with a pen that won't fade. Put it somewhere you would put a passport. Do not skip this for any wallet that will ever hold value.

The wrong answers are tempting, common, and how almost every "I lost my crypto" story ends:

• Screenshots. Cloud-synced by default on every modern OS. One compromised cloud account hands the phrase to whoever broke in.
• Plain text files. Same problem, often worse — searchable by malware looking for the literal string "abandon ability" at the start of a BIP-39 phrase.
• Password managers. Better than the above two, much worse than paper. A password manager is a single attack surface that already holds everything else you care about; concentrating the wallet seed there means one breach loses the lot.
• Photos of the paper. Defeats the entire point of writing it on paper.

If you hold meaningful value, etch the phrase into stainless steel. Metal seed-storage products exist for ~$30 and survive fire, flood, and the slow decay that paper does not.

Splitting and storing

Two reasonable patterns:

Single copy, well hidden. One steel backup in a place only you can reach. Simple, robust against software attacks, fragile against you forgetting where you put it.

Geographic separation. Two identical copies in two different physical locations (home and a safety deposit box, for example). Doubles the attack surface — anyone finding either copy compromises the wallet — but survives a house fire.

Shamir Secret Sharing (splitting the phrase into k-of-n shares where no single share is useful) is supported by the desktop app under Settings → Advanced → Split recovery. Use it if you understand the threat model; otherwise the marginal complexity is more likely to lose you the wallet than save it.

Restoring from a phrase

Any Valdium wallet that follows the project derivation path can restore from the same phrase and will arrive at the same address. Open a fresh install of the extension, the desktop app, or the CLI; choose Import from recovery phrase; type the words in order. The wallet rebuilds the keypair and starts indexing balance history from chain genesis.

The CLI never echoes the words you type. If a UI shows the words as you type them, it should also let you toggle them hidden — and you should toggle them hidden whenever you are not 100% sure the screen is not being recorded.

If you think your phrase is compromised

Move first, investigate later. Generate a new wallet, transfer everything you hold to the new address, and stop using the old phrase immediately. There is no way to revoke a phrase from the chain's perspective — only to empty the accounts it controls and abandon them. The clock starts the moment you suspect.

If a website, a wallet you don't recognize, a "support agent" on Telegram, or anyone else asks you to enter your recovery phrase to claim, verify, migrate, or upgrade anything — it is a phish. There are no exceptions to this rule on any chain, and there are none on Valdium.

What "deterministic" buys you

Because the phrase determines the keypair, you can throw away the wallet device entirely and the wallet survives. Lost laptop, dead phone, corrupted disk — none of it matters as long as the 24 words are still legible somewhere. The phrase is the wallet; the device is just a viewport.