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Seed Generation Process

A seed is used by a Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallet to generate deterministic private/public keys. The Decred wallet (Decrediton/dcrwallet) seed is 256 bits (32 bytes) and the mnemonic seed is thirty-three words.

The mnemonic seed generation process can be understood in three steps:

  1. Generate 256 bits (32 bytes) of entropy (seed) from cryptographically random data.
  2. Create a checksum by hashing the seed with SHA-256d, and append the first byte of the hash to the initial seed.
  3. Look up each of the 33 bytes on the PGP Word List; (a list of 512 words split into 256 even and odd phonetically distinct words), using even words for even bytes and odd words for odd bytes.

Decred mnemonic seed process