Backing up your wallet seed

On this page

• Write down your seed words
• What seed words do and don't do
• Wallet derivation paths

It is critical that you back up your wallet seed. The Bisq wallet is totally controlled by you, and you only—wallets are created and stored by the Bisq software right on your machine.

For this reason, you should keep your Bisq wallet's seed words safe and encrypt your Bisq wallet as well. There are no other copies of this data, so you're on your own if you lose them.

Write down your seed words

With your wallet seed words and date, you can recover your Bisq wallet and funds if the wallet is ever lost, destroyed, or corrupted.

The date is not strictly required, but it makes the recovery process drastically quicker. Without a date, bitcoinj (the library Bisq uses to interact with the Bitcoin network) will resort to traversing the entire Bitcoin blockchain from 2013 (sometime around block 260,000) in order to rebuild your wallet state, and it will take a very long time. Specifying the date your wallet was created cuts recovery time significantly by telling bitcoinj where to start traversing the blockchain.^{2026 source}

You can find your wallet's seed words in Account > Wallet seed. If you've encrypted your wallet, you'll need to enter the password before you can see your seed words.

Please actually write down your seed words and date with a pen and paper. Saving them on your computer, even if you do so in a secure password manager, makes it possible for a hacker to obtain them through sneaky schemes like keylogging. Going low-tech with pen and paper eliminates all such digital attack vectors.

Location of wallet seed words and date.
Historical full-size recovered source. Provenance catalogue.

What seed words do and don't do

Backing up a Bisq wallet's seed words only ensures that you will always have access to the funds stored in that Bisq wallet.

All other Bisq data must be backed up separately. Keys used for signing P2P messages (trade-related messages such as acknowledging payment sending/receiving, trader chat, dispute resolution, etc), Tor keys, payment account details, and more must be backed up separately.

Wallet derivation paths

Bisq’s built-in bitcoin wallet is based on BIP-44. BTC segwit addresses have a m/44'/0'/1' derivation path and legacy addresses have a m/44'/0'/0' derivation path. BSQ wallets have a m/44'/142'/0' derivation path.

The same seed phrase is used for BTC and BSQ wallets.

Please do not try to send BSQ to a non-Bisq wallet, or to otherwise create your own BSQ transactions. The rules to form a valid BSQ transaction are rather complex, and even the slightest error can result in invalid BSQ. Bisq will NOT provide support for any such cases.

Historical template from the 14 October 2026 archive · source