Entering the Monolith: what is the Seed and why is it important?
When you sign up to Monolith, one of the first steps of the on-boarding process involves safe storing your Seed. The Seed, or “seed phrase”, is a series of words associated with your Monolith wallet. Looking after the Seed is a crucial part of securing your wallet because it can be used to access your funds. In this guide, we’ll explain how the Seed works, and why it’s so important.
The Seed explained
Seed phrases are used to access cryptocurrency wallets.
The words in the Seed represent a series of numbers that can be used to unlock the wallet’s public key and private key. Though “seed phrase” is the most commonly used term for this series of words, it’s sometimes referred to as the “recovery phrase” or “backup phrase”.
Importantly, the Seed is separate from the private key itself, and one phrase can be used to generate multiple keys. That means one Seed can correspond to several Ethereum addresses.
The seed phrase originated with the development of Bitcoin’s BIP39 word list, an index of 2,048 English words recorded in alphabetical order with a corresponding number from 1 to 2,048.
An example of a 12-word seed phrase is as follows:
1. century
2. north
3. slim
4. glad
5. blouse
6. anxiety
7. warm
8. typical
9. steel
10. zone
11. word
12. divide
The numbers associated with each word on the BIP39 list can also be used to unlock a wallet’s private key.
The order of the words is important: a wallet can only be unlocked if the words are entered in the correct sequence (i.e. in the example above, the first word would be “century”, and the final would be “divide”).
The Seed and Monolith
If you lose access to your Monolith wallet, you can import your Seed into our app on another phone or any other compatible wallet to recover your funds.
It’s very important that you keep the Seed safe: without it, you will not be able to recover the funds if you lose access to your wallet. Equally, if anyone gets hold of your Seed, they could access your wallet and drain the funds.
You are prompted to make a note of your Seed when you begin the Monolith on-boarding process. If you ever need to check the Seed, you can find it by selecting “Back up Seed” under the “Settings” tab of the app.
Storing your Seed
We recommend writing down your Seed (taking care of the word order) and storing it in a safe place.
For extra security, some people may opt for measures such as splitting the Seed in multiple locations or locking the Seed in a secure bank vault. Both of these measures go some way to reducing the risk of theft.
In case of fire, a material like titanium can be a more durable material than paper. Several titanium and steel storage solutions are available on the market today.
We would recommend against storing your Seed on a computer or mobile device: if it ever gets compromised, someone with the right know-how could use it to access your funds.
Extra security measures
Monolith offers several security features in case your wallet is compromised.
These include the PIN code to access the Monolith app and biometric identification.
You can also set your own Whitelisted Addresses, a Daily Send Limit and a Daily Gas Limit.
Nevertheless, it’s crucial that the Seed is safeguarded as an attacker could use it to access your funds.
Remember: store a copy of your Seed in a safe place, and never share it with anyone.
Download the Monolith app here.
