A token deployed using registered recovery phrase 102,240.

What a recovery phrase is

A recovery phrase is the sentence a Bitcoin wallet gives you instead of a raw private key. Under BIP39 the sentence is 12 or 24 words from a fixed list of 2,048 words. 102,240 is not the number of words. A phrase that long would not be a wallet. 102,240 is the registration number of one phrase.

The words encode entropy, plus a short checksum taken from SHA-256, so a mistyped word fails a check. The sentence is then stretched into a 64-byte seed with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512, 2,048 rounds, and the salt mnemonic plus an optional passphrase. BIP32 derives keys from that seed. One of those keys is the native segwit key that deploys sha1024: a bc1q address, witness version 0, twenty bytes of HASH160 of the public key.

What “registered” means

Registered means the phrase was entered in a registry and given the number 102,240 before deployment. The record is the number and a commitment to the phrase. The words are not in the record. If the words were stored, anyone could derive the key and deploy, or take, whatever that key controls.

The commitment is a hash. The registry can show that phrase 102,240 exists. It cannot show the sentence. The holder is the only one who can turn the sentence into the seed, the seed into the key, and the key into a signature.

How that deploys the token

Deployment is one transaction signed by the key from phrase 102,240. Until that signature, the public key is not on chain. The output that holds the key’s coins is only the 20-byte hash. The witness of the deploy transaction carries the signature and the public key. Nodes check that HASH160 of the key matches the address. That check is what ties the token launch to registration 102,240: the signature could only be made by the phrase that was registered under that number.

After the deploy, the public key is public. Anything left on that address is sitting on a revealed key. The deploy spends the balance. The phrase is still the root, and it is still not printed. Later spends, once block H0 is in force, are hash-based signatures rather than another ECDSA signature from the same revealed key.