What you should never move between devices, and what is fine
2026-09-25
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Most advice about moving things between devices is about how. This one is about whether.
There is a category of text that should not travel at all, by any method, including ours. Knowing where that line sits is more useful than any transfer trick, because the transfer method stops mattering once you have moved the wrong thing.
The line
A wallet address is a destination. A seed phrase is the wallet.
An address tells the world where to send funds. It is derived from a public key, it appears on-chain the moment anything moves, and sharing it is how receiving works. If a stranger learns your address, they can look at your balance. That is a privacy cost and it is not a loss of funds.
A seed phrase, sometimes called a recovery phrase, is twelve or twenty-four words that regenerate every private key in the wallet. Anyone who has those words has the wallet. Not a copy of it, not access to look at it. It is theirs, from any device, anywhere, and there is nothing you can do afterwards because there is no account to freeze and no transaction to reverse.
That is the whole line. One is an address on an envelope. The other is the house.
Never move: the actual list
Seed and recovery phrases. No exceptions. Not through us, not in a message, not in an email to yourself, not in a photo, not in a password manager sync, not read aloud, not typed into any website. If it must exist somewhere other than where it was generated, it goes onto paper or metal by hand.
Private keys. Same reasoning, same rule.
Hardware wallet PINs. They protect the device. A PIN in a chat thread and a stolen device is a solved problem for the thief.
Exchange passwords and two-factor secrets together. Either alone is bad. Both in the same channel defeats the point of having two factors.
If you catch yourself about to move one of these because a support agent asked, stop. Support does not need your seed phrase, ever, and being asked for one is the clearest signal there is that you are being robbed. That is true whether the request arrives by email, in a chat window, from a verified-looking account, or over the phone from someone who sounds tired and official.
Fine to move: also a list
Receiving addresses. This is what we usually mean when we talk about moving wallet text. It is public information and the only real risks are transcription error and it lingering somewhere afterwards.
Transaction hashes. Public by definition.
Public keys and extended public keys. Worth a note: an extended public key lets someone see every address your wallet will generate and therefore your whole balance history. Not a theft risk, a substantial privacy one. Treat it as sensitive even though it cannot move funds.
Contract addresses, ENS names, invoice references. All public.
The honest summary is that almost everything you will ever need to move in practice is on this second list, and the first list exists for the one day someone tries to talk you across the line.
Where we sit
This is our own service, so read this with that in mind.
ZAGO.TO moves text between devices using four digits and deletes it about a minute after it is opened. For a receiving address, that is useful: nobody retypes 42 characters, and the address does not stay in a chat thread afterwards.
For a seed phrase, it is not useful, and we would rather say so plainly than let a disappearing-text service look like a safe place to put one.
Two reasons, and the second is the one that matters.
First, our server can read the text while it is there. There is no browser-side scrambling in place today. For a public address that is a small thing. For a seed phrase it is disqualifying on its own.
Second, and more fundamentally: a seed phrase that has been typed into any internet-connected text box should be considered exposed from that moment, no matter what the service does afterwards. Deleting our copy does not un-type it on the keyboard it was typed on, does not clear the clipboard it passed through, and does not help if either machine is compromised. The correct response to a seed phrase touching a browser is to move the funds to a new wallet, not to delete the message.
So the rule is not "use us carefully for seed phrases". The rule is that seed phrases do not go into browsers.
Why hardware wallets exist
This distinction is the entire reason hardware wallets are a product.
A hardware wallet generates the seed on the device and never lets it leave. You confirm transactions by pressing a button on the device itself, so the private key signs without ever being present on the computer. Even if the machine it is plugged into is fully compromised, the key is not on that machine to steal.
The seed phrase is shown to you once, on the device screen, during setup. It is written on paper by hand. That is deliberate, and it is why the setup process feels old-fashioned. The inconvenience is the feature: there is no digital copy to leak because one was never made.
If you are holding an amount you would be upset to lose, this is the change that actually moves the needle, far more than being careful about how you move addresses around.
The practical version
Ask one question before moving anything: if a stranger read this, could they take the money?
If yes, it does not travel. Not through a better tool, not through a faster one, not through one that promises to forget.
If no, move it in as few hops as you can, verify it on arrival, and prefer methods that do not leave a copy behind. That is the whole discipline, and it is short enough to remember when someone is on the phone telling you to hurry.