Did you lose your keys?
Keys play a critical and essential role in the protection of all your cryptocurrencies that you possess.
There are two types of keys, the first one we're going to discuss are your private keys.
private keys are used to authenticate the owner of the particular cryptos and to encrypt the wallet. This keeps any person that finds your wallet from taking possession of your cryptocurrencies.
On the other hand you have public keys public keys are used to send and receive funds or other cryptocurrencies. If I was to send you one Bitcoin, I would ask for your public key or wallet address, because, I need that address in order to send the cryptocurrency to you and not to someone else. So, ensure that you keep your private key in a safe place.
A seed phrase or recovery phrase or backup seed phrase, which is just used to recover your funds, tokens or cryptos on the blockchain. Sometimes you going to have your 12 or more keywords( used to regain access to wallet) but you're going to have to know those words and in the correct order in order to restore your wallet should you lose access to it, so again store them in a safe place that you know you only have access to and no one else. Most of the time they're going to instruct you to write the words down and ensure that you read over them, at a minimum of two or three times to ensure that you have them spelled correctly, and are in the proper order!
if they're not in the proper order when you try to enter them to recover your wallet, you won't be able to recover your wallet. And let me say it again, please store them in a safe location, if someone recovers your seed phrase or 12 words they can recover your coins from wherever they are.
Note: smart keys are also another type of key that are in use. Smart keys are new technology that will allow you to keep multiple wallets in tokens or coins under one single private key so instead of having a lot of different keys you can have this one key to unlock different wallets especially when they're on different platforms.