Secret Sharing
Splitting a seed phrase into several pieces, requiring a minimum number of them to be brought together to reconstruct the original.
Secret sharing splits a single secret, such as a seed phrase, into several separate pieces, requiring a specific minimum number of them to be brought together to reconstruct the original — commonly implemented using a method called Shamir's Secret Sharing.
This reduces the risk of any single piece being lost or stolen, since no individual piece on its own reveals the secret, at the cost of needing real coordination among multiple people or locations when reconstruction is actually needed. See Kaavon's "Planning for What Happens to Your Crypto After You're Gone" guide for how this compares to other inheritance approaches.
Examples
- A seed phrase split via secret sharing into 5 pieces, requiring any 3 to reconstruct it, survives the loss of up to 2 pieces without losing access.
- Secret sharing trades single-point-of-failure risk for coordination complexity, the same kind of trade-off a multisig wallet makes.