Skip to content

Polyseed

René Brunner edited this page Oct 17, 2022 · 3 revisions

What Is It

Polyseed is a new system for Monero seeds, i.e. a way to encode the bits of the spend private key using everyday words in various languages.

It was developed by @tevador (GitHub). The code repository is here. It goes back to a lengthy discussion on the Monero GitHub about a new seed format. The original now obsolete PoC repository is here.

Key differences compared with the current 25 word Monero seeds are a shorter length of only 16 words and the encoding of the so-called wallet birthday, the time the seed / wallet was created. This eliminates what is arguably the biggest single problem when people restore Monero wallets from seed, failing to enter a suitable restore height which results in a wallet that does not show all transactions.

Feather Wallet is so far the only wallet that implements Polyseed, since August 2022, as described here. Earlier versions implemented 14 word seeds based on the PoC.

Relation to Seraphis

There is no technical dependency between Seraphis and Polyseed. It would be possible to switch Monero wallets to Polyseed long before any hardfork to Seraphis and Jamtis. On the other hand Monero could continue to use its current 25 word seed scheme for Seraphis and Jamtis.

Nevertheless you could argue that the Seraphis hardfork would be a very good chance to switch the seeds to Polyseed as well. Ideally all wallets would start to offer support at the same time, which seems possible in a natural way when all wallets have to change anyway because of the hardfork. It might also be better for Monero users because there was a single transition instead of two, although the introduction of a new seed format is probably a much smaller event than the arrival of Seraphis and Jamtis.

Clone this wiki locally