Electrum

Restoring a Trustodian Bitcoin wallet in Electrum, where BIP-39 is off by default

Electrum restores ordinary Bitcoin wallets from the phrase. It does not import Trustodian vault descriptors; use Sparrow for those.

What you are recovering, and how the index maps to addresses, is on Bitcoin.

m/84'/0'/0'

Electrum has its own seed format, which is not BIP-39. Reading your phrase as a BIP-39 mnemonic requires an option that is off by default. Without it Electrum rejects the phrase or interprets it as something else.

1. Install Electrum from electrum.org

   Only from that domain. Fake Electrum builds are a long-running and effective attack.

2. Start a standard wallet restore from a seed

   Create a new wallet file, choose a standard wallet, then the option stating that you already have a seed.

3. Turn on BIP39 before entering the words

   On the seed entry screen, open Options and tick BIP39.

   The same options panel is where you enable a passphrase, which Electrum describes as extending the seed with custom words. Enable it only if a passphrase was actually set.

4. Choose native segwit and confirm the path

   Electrum then asks for the script type and derivation path together. Choose native segwit (p2wpkh); the path should read m/84'/0'/0'. If Electrum offers to detect existing accounts, that is a convenient way to have it find the funded path for you, but still confirm the result against your address.

5. Compare the first receive address

   Before trusting the balance, match address 0 against your first Trustodian Bitcoin wallet.

Electrum will happily restore the same words as a legacy or nested-segwit wallet, on a matching path, and show you a perfectly working wallet with no money in it. If the addresses do not start bc1q, start over with native segwit.

If something does not match

See Troubleshooting. On Electrum the two usual causes are the BIP-39 checkbox being left off and the script type defaulting to something other than native segwit.