Backup Wallet

Now that we’ve confirmed everything is working as expected, let’s back it all up before receiving any bitcoin.

Seeds and Public Keys

There are two components to your wallet that you need to backup to guarantee future recovery: seed phrases and public keys.

Seed Phrases

BIP39 seeds are 24* word phrases that represent your bitcoin private keys. With multisig, you only need to have m (of your total n) seed phrases to sign a transaction. Seed phrases should be guarded very carefully as anyone who gets access to m of your n seed phrases can steal your bitcoin!

*Expert users may choose to use shorter seed phrases, though we do not normally recommend this.

Public Keys

One confusing thing about multisig is that you need all of your public keys (including associated metadata) in order to be able to spend any of your bitcoin. Public keys do not need to be guarded nearly as carefully as seeds; anyone who gets access to public key information can only see which bitcoin addresses belong to you but cannot spend from them.

For non-expert users, we recommend storing a copy of all extended public keys with each individual seed as well as redundant backups in many other places that may include:

• Unsecured in a filing cabinet at home and/or work
• With your heirs, who may one day have to figure this out without your help
• In a safe-deposit box
• With your accountant, lawyer, or financial advisor
• With an insecure cloud provider (advanced users may want to encrypt this first)

Table of Contents

1. Backup Seeds Instructions
2. Backup Public Keys

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