Can We Descramble an Unsorted Seed Phrase?

Many crypto users wonder if it’s possible to recover a scrambled seed phrase—also called a mnemonic phrase. Seed phrases, introduced in the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39 (BIP-39) in 2013, are the gold standard for wallet backup and recovery.

They come in 12, 18, or 24 words, each selected from a 2,048-word dictionary, available in several langauges. But what happens if you lose the correct order of those words? Can brute force and GPUs help descramble them, or is recovery unrealistic?

Each word represents an 11-bit number (2¹¹ = 2048). The longer the seed phrase, the more entropy (randomness) it provides.

The order of the words in the seed phrase matters. If you change the order, the resulting set of keys—if valid—will also change. The last word doesn’t contain a full 11 bits of entropy; instead, part of it is entropy and part is a checksum. The first (n-1) words plus part of the last word are hashed, and the result must match the checksum bits embedded in the last word. That’s how a wallet checks if a mnemonic phrase is valid.

For example, a 12-word seed contains 128 bits of entropy and 4 checksum bits. That’s why 12 × 11 = 132 total bits are encoded across the words: 128 entropy + 4 checksum.

We wondered if it’s possible to sort a shuffled 18-word seed phrase. Imagine a GPU farm with 140 NVIDIA RTX 3080 cards, each capable of testing 500,000 candidates per second. That’s a combined capacity of 70 million checks per second (70 MH/s).

500 kH/s = 500 × 1,000 = 500,000 checks/second
70 MH/s = 70 × 1,000,000 = 70,000,000 checks/second

To calculate the number of possible valid combinations, we fix all but the last word ((n-1)! permutations) and then multiply by the number of valid options for the final word (v). For an 18-word mnemonic, n = 18 and v = 32.

Solve (n – 1)! × v with n = 18 and v = 32

Step 1: Compute n – 1
18 – 1 = 17

Step 2: Compute 17!
17! = 17 × 16 × 15 × … × 2 × 1
= 355,687,428,096,000

Step 3: Multiply by v = 32
355,687,428,096,000 × 32

• 355,687,428,096,000 × 30 = 10,670,622,842,880,000
• 355,687,428,096,000 × 2 = 711,374,856,192,000

Add them:
10,670,622,842,880,000 + 711,374,856,192,000 = 11,381,997,699,072,000

Final Answer:
(18 – 1)! × 32 ≈ 1.14 × 10¹⁶ (≈ 11.38 quadrillion) possible combinations

At 70 million checks per second, this brute-force search would take about 5.2 years. The half-crack time (average time to succeed) is about 2.6 years.

Words	Entropy (bits)	Checksum (bits)	Total Bits	Valid Last Word Options (v)	Total Combos	Time @ 70 MH/s	Half-Time
12	128	4	132	16	≈ 5.11 × 109	≈ 73 s	≈ 37 s
18	192	6	198	32	≈ 1.14 × 1016	≈ 5.2 years	≈ 2.6 years
24	256	8	264	256	≈ 2.07 × 1023	≈ 94–97 million years	N/A

For the 12-word case, brute-forcing the entire space takes just 73 seconds with 140 GPUs, or around 3 hours with a single GPU. But for a 24-word mnemonic, the search space is astronomical: about 97 million years even with the same GPU farm—roughly 0.7% of the universe’s age.

Conclusion: Trying to recover a scrambled seed phrase may sound like a clever backup strategy, but in practice it’s extremely risky. While a 12-word seed could be brute-forced in hours with the right hardware, an 18-word seed takes years and a 24-word seed is effectively impossible. If you want peace of mind, never rely on descrambling — always store your seed phrase safely, in the correct order, and with secure backups.

Remember: your seed phrase is the ultimate key to your crypto. Protect it properly — don’t count on being able to recover it if it’s scrambled.