MetaMask and Recovery

You can write your Secret Recovery Phrase down on a piece of paper (or, you know, titanium) or a flash drive; optionally, we allow you to download a file containing the phrase.

Intro to Secret Recovery Phrases

One of the key (you'll see what I did there) technologies underlying MetaMask, and most user account-related tools in the crypto space is the seed phrase, or as it's referred to in MetaMask, your Secret Recovery Phrase.

All of your accounts are mathematically derived from your Secret Recovery Phrase. You can think of the SRP like a keyring, and it holds as many private keys as you could want: and each one of those keys controls an account.

Now, if you want a technical explanation: Seed phrases as we know them today were codified for usage in Bitcoin, according to a standard referred to as Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39, or BIP-39. In simple terms, a series of words are selected with a high level of randomness from a specific list of words. In MetaMask and many other Ethereum-compatible technologies, there are 12 words in a seed phrase. Some older seeds generated by the Brave browser, and some hardware wallets, use 24-word phrases.

Each one of these words corresponds to a series of numbers, and when placed in a specific order, represent a much more user-friendly way to remember a very, very long number. That number is then used to deterministically generate your accounts, and you may hear people refer to deterministic wallets. In computer science, deterministic is used to describe a process (usually an algorithm of some kind) that will always generate the same result. In other words, your Secret Recovery Phrase will always generate the same set of accounts derived from it.

There are a number of important features to note here:

• The Secret Recovery Phrase is the secret that controls the wallet. If someone has this secret, they have complete access to the wallet. MetaMask does not keep your SRP: you are the custodian of your wallet. MetaMask representatives will never ask for your Secret Recovery Phrase, even in a customer support scenario. If someone does ask for it, they are likely trying to scam you or steal your funds.