Once enabled, you are immediately asked to reconnect your device. If you are using Trezor Model T, the device will ask you to choose between entering the passphrase using the touchscreen on your Trezor or typing the passphrase using the web browser. If you are using the original Trezor One model, you will be asked to type your passphrase in the web browser.

This time, you decide to use your mother’s first name as your passphrase because you figured it would be easy to remember. You carefully type “Martha” in the respective box, hit enter and you are suddenly presented with an empty wallet. No accounts, no funds in sight.

After you catch your breath and remember this is exactly what was supposed to happen, you quickly realize that you will need to somehow move your funds to this new hidden wallet. To do this, you proceed the same way you would normally receive transactions. You find the receiving address and copy it. We wholeheartedly recommend jotting down this address somewhere offline, especially if you are moving your balances across passphrases for the first time.

Now that you have the receiving address from your new account, you need to get to your original accounts. To do this, you reconnect your device and hit enter right away when prompted to type a passphrase (enter nothing). Voilà! You now see your original “seed-only” wallet. You navigate towards the “Send” tab and make a transaction to the address you previously copied. Again, start small and triple-check, just in case, if you are doing this for the first time.

You sent the transaction to your new accounts, and now it is time to check whether everything is ok. You reconnect your device, enter the passphrase and… Nothing! No accounts, no transactions. What happened? This time, you managed to mistype the passphrase and use “martha” instead of “Martha”. Remember, every character matters. The only way to access the path to your accounts is to enter every character exactly like before.

Using “Passphrase”, “passphrase”, “passphrase “, “ passphrase” will generate four different, unique wallets. Can you spot the difference?

Let’s take this a bit further and imagine that after some time, you tragically lost your precious device. How do you recover a passphrase protected wallet?

No worries! You can use your spare Trezor to recover your existing accounts using the recovery seed. Trezor Wallet will ask whether you used to use the passphrase and let you enable it right away. Once the seed is loaded on your device, all you need to do is enter the very same passphrase you were using before. You may have to enable the passphrases manually if the passphrase feature is not enabled upon recovery, or if you are using a different BIP39-compatible wallet to restore your accounts.