We're thrilled you're using the Steelwallet to secure your valuable cryptocurrency assets! It's a fantastic tool designed for the ultimate backup of your recovery phrase, ensuring it stays safe from physical damage like fire or water. Let's dive into exactly what types of recovery phrases you can engrave onto it.

Supported recovery phrase standard: BIP-39

Your Steelwallet is specifically designed to work with the most common standard for generating and managing recovery phrases (sometimes called seed phrases or mnemonic seeds) in the crypto world: BIP-39.

This means you can confidently back up recovery phrases that follow this standard. The Steelwallet supports the following BIP-39 recovery phrase lengths:

• 12 words
• 18 words
• 24 words

So, whether your hardware wallet (like our awesome BitBox02!) or software wallet generated a 12, 18, or 24-word BIP-39 recovery phrase, your Steelwallet is ready to secure it!

Why do I only punch the first four letters?

You might have noticed that you only need to punch the first four letters of each word from your recovery phrase onto the Steelwallet tiles. How cool is that? This is possible thanks to a clever feature of the official BIP-39 wordlist!

The words on this list were carefully chosen so that no two words share the same first four letters. Each word is uniquely identifiable just by its first four letters.

Therefore, when you need to recover your funds, knowing just the first four letters is enough to identify the complete word without any doubt. This makes the engraving process quicker and easier while keeping your backup just as secure!

By using the Steelwallet with your BIP-39 recovery phrase, you're taking a crucial step in safeguarding your crypto journey for the long term. We love helping you keep your assets secure!