How to restore your wallet from seed phrase

A seed phrase is a collection of words that can be used to generate a private key.

This article explains how to restore your wallet in the Radix Desktop Wallet from a seed phrase. When you set up the Radix Desktop Wallet, you are provided with a seed phrase. Safely storing this seed phrase allows you to recover all of your accounts and the tokens they hold by using the process described here. This also means that you must always protect your seed phrase; if somebody else can access it, they also can “recover” your account and take your tokens!

A seed phrase doesn't back up just one account in your wallet - it backs up all of the accounts that you may have created within the wallet. They are all associated with one seed phrase and so you can recover all of them when you restore your wallet from the seed phrase. The seed phrase however doesn’t back up the names you gave the accounts - you will have to recreate those.

Just restore the wallet from your seed phrase, re-add your accounts one by one, and you’ll have all the same account addresses and tokens that you did before. The steps below will show you how.

Step 1a

If you are already logged into a wallet, you must reset your Desktop Wallet. (For example, if you have lost your wallet password, or want to connect the Wallet to a different set of accounts than what it is currently using.)

Please follow the instructions in this article: How to completely reset your Desktop Wallet, which also provides instructions on how to restore your wallet from seed phrase.

Step 1b

If you are installing your wallet brand new or have a reset Desktop Wallet, you will be presented with this screen.

Click “Restore a previous wallet”.

Step 2

You will be asked to enter your seed phrase. Enter the 12 words in the fields displayed and click “I’ve done it!”.

Step 3

Next, you will be asked to set a password. This password is used to log into the Desktop Wallet and can also be used to reveal your seed phrase, so ensure that you keep this password secure, perhaps using a password manager such as 1Password or Lastpass. Click “Confirm”.

Step 4

Next, you must set a 4 digit PIN. This PIN is used to authorize transactions.

Step 5

Unfortunately, seed phrases cannot back up the names of your accounts, so you will need to set those names again. Name your first account now and click “Save”.

Step 6

The first account of your wallet will now be restored.

Step 7

If you previously created multiple accounts within your wallet, you will need to re-add those. Accounts will be re-added in just the same order that they were originally ordered and will still hold the same tokens. To do this, first click your account name in the left menu bar. In this case, the account name is “Satoshi”.

That will then present this screen that displays the accounts associated with the wallet. So far, we only have the first account, ending “...3m8” named “Satoshi”.

If you wish to re-add your other accounts, please click “Add Account” in the left menu bar.

This will require you to name the account. In this case, “Hal”. Click Save.

This then restores your second account on the wallet, ending “...ung”. Please note, the names that you give these accounts does not affect the restoration process. What matters is the order that the accounts were originally created in: they will be restored in the same order.

If you had even more accounts associated with the wallet, just keep adding accounts until you have all your accounts restored.

Further reading:

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