How to back up your XELIS Wallet seed phrase

A seed phrase is 25 randomly-chosen words. From those words, XELIS Wallet can deterministically regenerate every private key in your wallet — past, present, and future.

That means: the seed phrase is the wallet. Backing up the seed is more important than backing up the wallet file, the password, or anything else.

Use a pen (not pencil) on plain paper. Write each word legibly, numbered 1 through 25. Re-read it twice. Avoid abbreviations or shorthand.

Never: screenshot the seed, type it into a text file, paste it into a password manager, email it, photograph it, message it to yourself, or store it in any cloud service.

A single backup is a single point of failure. House fires, floods, mis-placed papers, and household accidents account for more lost crypto than hackers do.

Store the copies in two physically separate locations — for example, a home safe and a trusted relative's safe, or a home safe and a bank deposit box. Both copies should be equally protected.

Paper degrades. For amounts you plan to hold for years, stamp your seed phrase into a steel or titanium plate (Cryptosteel, Billfodl, Coldbit, etc.). Metal backups survive fire, water, and most accidents that destroy paper.

Even with metal, make a second copy. The principle of two locations still applies.

A backup you've never tested is a hope, not a backup. The cheapest test:

1. Install XELIS Wallet on a second device (or a clean profile).
2. Use Restore from seed with your written copy.
3. Confirm the receive address matches your real wallet.

Do this within 24 hours of creating the wallet, and again any time you move or update your backups.

The 3-2-1 rule comes from the data-backup world: three copies, on two different media, with one copy off-site. It maps cleanly to seed-phrase backups and is the single best framework for thinking through whether your backup will actually survive a real-world failure.

• Three copies. Two is the minimum; three gives you survival when one location is unreachable and a second is being audited or moved.
• Two different media. Paper plus metal beats two copies of paper. The failure modes are different: paper burns and gets soggy; metal can be physically stolen but does not degrade. Mixing them defends against any single class of failure.
• One copy off-site. A safe deposit box, a trusted family member in a different city, or your own property in a different building. Same-building backups all share the same risk: that building.

Picking exact locations and media is personal — but the discipline of writing the plan down and revisiting it yearly is universal. The strongest seed-phrase backups in the world are useless if you forgot where the third copy lives.

Shamir's Secret Sharing (SSS) lets you split a seed into N shares such that any K of them can reconstruct it. A common configuration is 3-of-5: five shares distributed to trusted parties, any three of which can recover the wallet. No two shares reveal anything.

SSS shines for two scenarios: estate planning (your heirs need K-of-N collaboration to claim funds, defeating any single bad actor), and high-value cold storage where geographic distribution is critical. It hurts when used casually — a botched share, a lost share, or a misunderstanding about the threshold can lock you out as effectively as losing the seed itself.

If you go down this path, use a well-documented implementation, write down the threshold and total-share parameters with each share, and run a full restore drill before relying on it. Naive splits (write half the words on one paper and half on another) are dangerous — they cut the brute-force search space dramatically and offer no recovery benefit over a single copy stored well.

The standard advice is: never store your seed phrase digitally. That advice is correct as a default because most users will not encrypt properly, will use weak passwords, and will sync the file to the cloud without realising. But under specific conditions, an encrypted digital backup can be a useful third copy alongside two physical ones.

If — and only if — you can do all of the following, then a digital backup is acceptable as a supplement (never a primary): encrypt the seed phrase with a passphrase of at least 20 random characters (not a memorable phrase, not a password you use anywhere else), using a tool you've verified the binary of (age, gpg, or a password manager's encrypted-attachment feature). Store the encrypted blob in two different cloud accounts you control. Store the decryption passphrase exclusively in your head and in a sealed envelope with your physical seed backup — never in the same place as the encrypted file.

The threat model this defeats is: house fire destroys both physical copies on the same day. The threat model it introduces is: weak passphrase + leaked cloud blob equals total compromise. Be honest with yourself about which risk is larger for you.

If you die or are incapacitated and no-one in your life knows your seed exists, your XEL is gone for good. The chain has no recovery process and no next-of-kin override. The only protection is documentation, and the only documentation that works is documentation your heirs can actually find and act on.

Write a sealed letter — not stored with the seed itself — that explains: (a) that you hold XELIS, (b) approximately how much and where its existence is recorded (a spreadsheet, a beneficiary list), (c) where each seed-phrase copy is physically located, and (d) a non-technical walkthrough of how to install XELIS Wallet and use the Restore From Seed flow. Update this letter every time anything in (a) through (c) changes.

Lodge the letter with a solicitor or in a will, with clear instructions about when it should be opened. For larger holdings, consider one of the specialist crypto-inheritance services that build legal scaffolding around exactly this problem. The point is not what mechanism you choose — it is that you choose one before you need it.