Before you begin

What you need in hand, how the passphrase behaves, and the rules that protect the phrase

What you need

1. Your recovery phrase

   12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 English BIP-39 words, in order, written down when the account was created. The phrase is the whole secret: there is no second copy anywhere, and neither Trustodian nor anyone else can reissue it.

2. Your passphrase, if one was set

   An optional extra secret, sometimes called a 25th word. It is not part of the written phrase. See The passphrase below.

3. The derivation path for the chain

   Which addresses the phrase produces depends on the path. Derivation paths has the full table, and each network page repeats the one path it needs.

4. Your Recovery Kit

   It lists every vault and wallet on the account. For Bitcoin and Cardano vaults it is required — those cannot be rebuilt from phrases alone. For everything else it saves you having to remember addresses, and it is the only place that names the wallets a phrase will not bring back. See The Recovery Kit.

The passphrase

If a passphrase was set on the account, it is required alongside the words. It is fixed when the phrase is established and cannot be changed, recovered or reset afterwards.

A phrase with a passphrase, restored without it, does not fail. It succeeds, and silently produces a different, empty wallet. The reverse is also true: entering a passphrase that was never set produces a different empty wallet.

If you do not know whether one was set, restore first with no passphrase and compare the resulting address against the one you expect. See Troubleshooting if neither attempt matches.

It is a standard BIP-39 passphrase, so any wallet with a passphrase field takes it. Trustodian limits it to 50 characters of printable ASCII — letters, digits, punctuation and spaces — so that the hardware wallets you may recover it on can reproduce it exactly. Outside that range, implementations disagree on how to normalise the text, and the same passphrase you typed here would derive a different address elsewhere.

Cardano combines the phrase and the passphrase differently from every other network here, so a Cardano wallet must be on the Icarus scheme or it lands on different addresses. See Icarus, not Ledger.

What the phrase does not cover

Several kinds of wallet are not reproduced by importing the phrase.

Your Recovery Kit marks each of your wallets with whether the phrase recovers it, so you do not have to work out which of the cases below applies to which wallet. See Wallets the phrase does not cover.

Wallets you imported by private key

If you brought an existing wallet into Trustodian by pasting its private key, that key was never derived from the phrase. Recover it from wherever it came from.

Wallets belonging to an earlier phrase

If the account’s recovery phrase has ever been replaced, wallets created under an earlier phrase still derive from that phrase, not the current one. Each phrase you have ever held recovers the wallets that were created while it was current.

Bitcoin and Cardano vaults

A vault address is a script, not a key. Restoring the phrase gives you your one cosigner key; it does not tell any wallet what the vault is. See How vaults recover.

Safety rules

These are not general advice. Each one addresses a specific way a recovery goes wrong.

Type the phrase only into software you chose and installed yourself

Download the wallet from the vendor’s own site, checking the URL by hand rather than following a search result or a link someone sent you. Search ads and lookalike domains distribute builds that steal the phrase as you type it.

Never enter the phrase into a website

No legitimate service ever asks for it in a web page, including any page claiming to be Trustodian. A browser extension asking for it inside its own extension window is normal; the same request inside a web page is not.

Never send the phrase to anyone, including support

Trustodian support will never ask for your recovery phrase, your passphrase or a private key, and no page in this guide will ever ask you to disclose one. Anyone who does is attacking you.

Keep it off anything that syncs, and rehearse before you move everything

Cloud photos, notes apps, synced password managers, chat messages, clipboard managers and screenshots all leave copies you cannot delete. For a large balance, import on a machine with no network connection.

Then confirm the first address matches before moving a small test amount, and only afterwards the rest. A mismatched address caught at that point costs nothing.

How to tell the recovery worked

Do not check the balance first, because a balance of zero is ambiguous. Check the address.

1. Import the phrase and set the path.
2. Compare the first derived address, character for character, against the address shown in Trustodian or printed in your Recovery Kit.
3. Only then look at the balance.

If the address matches, the key is right and any balance you see is the truth. If it does not, go to Troubleshooting.