Tron vaults

Reading the account permissions from the chain and co-signing a transfer out of the vault

A Tron vault is an ordinary Tron account whose permissions were replaced. Both of them — owner and active — list the same owner addresses, each with weight 1, under the vault’s threshold.

Nothing about it is stored off the chain, so this page is a procedure rather than a restore.

What you need

1. The vault's address

   From your Recovery Kit, on the vault’s page. It is an ordinary T... address.

2. Enough owners' keys to reach the threshold

   Each key is an owner’s ordinary Tron wallet key — not a separate cosigner key. Each owner derives theirs from their own recovery phrase at the index they joined with, as described on Tron.

3. TronWeb

   npm install tronweb. A public node such as https://api.trongrid.io is enough.

4. TRX in the vault account

   Transactions are paid for in bandwidth and energy, charged to the vault, not to the signer. A vault holding only TRC-20 tokens and no TRX cannot send them. See Fees.

Read the permissions from the chain

Do this first. It is authoritative — the kit records what the vault was configured with, the chain holds what it actually has.

const { TronWeb } = require('tronweb')
const tronWeb = new TronWeb({ fullHost: 'https://api.trongrid.io' })

const account = await tronWeb.trx.getAccount(VAULT_ADDRESS)

console.log(account.owner_permission)   // { threshold, keys: [{ address, weight }] }
console.log(account.active_permission)  // [{ id: 2, threshold, keys, operations }]

Check the threshold and the key addresses against the Threshold and Owners printed on the vault’s page in your kit. If they disagree, trust the chain and find out why before signing anything.

Addresses inside a permission come back as hex. tronWeb.address.fromHex(...) converts one to the T... form printed in your kit.

Permission 2, not 0

Both permissions carry the same owners and the same threshold, but they authorise different things:

Permission	Id	What it signs
active	2	Spending: transfers, contract calls
owner	0	Changing the permissions themselves

To move funds you use 2. Passing the wrong id produces a transaction the network refuses.

Move the funds

1. Build the transaction under permission 2

   const tx = await tronWeb.transactionBuilder.sendTrx(
     DESTINATION_ADDRESS,
     AMOUNT_IN_SUN,
     VAULT_ADDRESS,
     { permissionId: 2 },
   )
   

   1 TRX is 1,000,000 SUN.

2. Have each owner sign in turn, until the threshold is met

   Each call adds one signature to the same transaction object and returns it.

   let signed = await tronWeb.trx.multiSign(tx, PRIVATE_KEY_A, 2)
   signed = await tronWeb.trx.multiSign(signed, PRIVATE_KEY_B, 2)
   

   Owners can do this on their own machines, passing the partially signed object along. It carries signatures, never a private key.

3. Broadcast

   const result = await tronWeb.trx.broadcast(signed)
   console.log(result.result) // true
   

Sending a TRC-20 token

Same two permissions, same signing. Only the build step differs:

const { transaction } = await tronWeb.transactionBuilder.triggerSmartContract(
  TOKEN_CONTRACT_ADDRESS,
  'transfer(address,uint256)',
  { feeLimit: 100_000_000, permissionId: 2 },
  [
    { type: 'address', value: DESTINATION_ADDRESS },
    { type: 'uint256', value: AMOUNT },
  ],
  VAULT_ADDRESS,
)

AMOUNT is in the token’s own smallest unit, which is not always six decimals — read decimals() off the contract rather than assuming.

Fees

Bandwidth and energy are charged to the vault account. Neither is bought as such: they come from staked TRX, or are paid for by burning TRX held by the account.

The practical rule for a recovery: send a small amount of TRX to the vault address first, then move the tokens.