Recovery Phrases

TL;DR

Your recovery phrase is 24 words that deterministically reproduce your Dilithium3 wallet. Anyone with the phrase controls the funds. Anyone without it doesn't — not us, not the app, not a "support team." Write it down on paper. Store it offline. Never digitize it. This is the single most important page in these docs.

What a recovery phrase is

Under the hood, your wallet is a Dilithium3 keypair — a ~4 KB secret key that's too long to write down comfortably. A recovery phrase is a short, human-friendly encoding of a seed. From that seed, the same keypair reproduces deterministically every time, on any machine.

You don't back up the secret key itself. You back up the phrase, and let the wallet re-derive the key from it when you need it.

Asentum recovery phrase format

Asentum uses a 24-word phrase drawn from the BIP-39 English wordlist, encoding 256 bits of entropy plus a checksum. We use the BIP-39 wordlist because it's already the most widely-audited list in crypto — not because we derive keys the Ethereum way.

The derivation from phrase → Dilithium3 keypair is Asentum-specific (BIP-32 doesn't exist for ML-DSA-65 yet). The same phrase produces the same keypair across the Chrome extension, the desktop app, and the CLI.

Backing up your wallet

Every Asentum wallet nags you to complete a backup until you do. The flow is the same in all three clients:

1. Open Settings → Back up wallet.
2. Enter your password to unlock the phrase.
3. Write the 24 words down, in order, on paper.
4. Confirm a few random words back into the app to prove you wrote them correctly.
5. Done — the nag disappears.

Restoring from a phrase

On a fresh install (new machine, reset app, forgot-password flow), the onboarding offers two paths:

• Create new wallet — generates fresh entropy.
• Restore from recovery phrase — type the 24 words, set a new password, your old account is back.

Restore is deterministic — you don't need any other file, backup, or chain scan. The phrase is enough.

How to store it

• Paper in a safe. The baseline.
• Two copies in different physical locations. House fire, flood, break-in — one backup isn't enough.
• Engraved metal. Fire- and water-proof. Worth the $30 if you hold real value.
• Never digitize. No cloud notes, no iMessage, no photo, no password manager, no email to yourself. Every theft of "recovery phrase" in crypto history happened via a digitized copy.
• Never share. There is no legitimate reason for any app, support agent, airdrop, or oracle to ask for it. Anyone asking is stealing.

If you lose it

Asentum has no recovery mechanism beyond the phrase. No customer support, no account reset, no "prove you own it" — the chain doesn't know who you are beyond the keypair. If you lose the phrase and access to an unlocked wallet copy, the funds are gone.

This is the tradeoff you signed up for when you chose a self-custodial chain. Back up. Verify your backup. Do it before you deposit real value.

Portability across wallets

A phrase exported from the Chrome extension restores in the desktop app and vice versa. A phrase exported from the CLI restores in either GUI. The format is stable across clients — that's a deliberate choice so you're never locked into one UI.