Hello guys,
just wanted you to let know,
I just came into the situation when I needed to access my wallet and didn’t have Ledger with me and found out that I cannot access it through entering my seed phrases into the Adalite.
I was quite confused because I thought that is why the seed phrases exist and then found out on the reddit forum that it is specifically connected to Adalite.
From what was there written, it uses slightly different standards than Bip-39, so the seed phrases doesn’t match.
You know, I am using Adalite because of multi account support and there are not many other wallets which supports it, so it can be cumbersome if you need to access them and don’t have ledger with you.
The other option should be Cc Vault which should support it, but I am glad I found it out because I was always counting on my seed phrases as an ultimate and quick access in case I need it.
That is not specific to Adalite. This will be the same in all Cardano wallet apps. They all use this different method of deriving the master key from the seed phrase.
The purpose of the seed phrase is not to use it interchangeably with the hardware device. If you regularly put the seed phrase into a computer, you could just not use a hardware wallet at all. Their purpose is that secrets – including the seed phrase – never leave them, are never put into a potentially compromised computer.
You can use the seed phrase to set up a new Ledger in case yours gets broken or lost.
It is true that with other cryptocurrencies, this difference in master key generation does not exist and you can just put the seed phrase of the Ledger into a wallet app. But also with them, I would only do that if you want to stop using a Ledger altogether and not as regular convenience.
Sure, I know this shouldn’t be an ordinary use of entering the wallet, but there may be cases when you need access immediately and don’t have ledger, otherwise I would have to take it everywhere with me more than a cell phone.
I know that everybody is creeping about this method including me, but it’s also stated on Ledger site as regular way how you could enter your wallet.
It would be nice to have freedom of choice what method to use even with all risks included, because now I am little like hostage, I am 5000 km away from home and either I’ll buy new ledger just for one use only or I will wait half a year or year until I get home.
P.S : But I know it cannot be changed just like this and probably it won’t change. Just stating my situation in which can also others end up.
@bwbush has restored from a Ledger seed phrase manually in this post. If you feel comfortable doing a lot of strange command line stuff, this would be an option.
Thanks for the help within the best possible possibilities available, it looks like really digging into something that was not meant for this purpose and that I would be really affraid of
I just tell my family that in case something happens to me, the seeds phrase on the paper doesn’t work and they must learn how to connect ledger, my mom must become crypto guy
I just got reply from the Ledger, it’s nice to see they will be dealing with the issue even if it looks they won’t be able to do anything about it:
“I made sure to try the different wallets and all the root keys are different (and will therefore show the zero balance, as you’ve experiencing) across all of the wallets. It would seem that at this stage, without creating a wallet yourself, it would still require the Ledger device, at this stage. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you a better answer, with regard to a solution, we’ll definitely raise this as a talking about internally, and see if it’s something that could potentially be resolved!”
You know, I am also thinking about what other user has posted on the forum. And that is theoretically in 10 or 20 years when the Ledger company does not exist and there are no hardware wallets of this type, will we be able to get to our accounts?
I think many people don’t know about this issue and just have written the seed phrase somewhere on the paper. Just trying to think longterm what happens when they pass away, someone inherits their paper and when they enter the seed phrase into the wallet the wallet will show zero balance.
Then the funds could be lost forever because nobody will know about them.
Shouldn’t we really start dealing with this issue like something that should be resolved?
As said in the other thread: If Ledger goes out of business, it is known, how this is done and there will probably be software solutions in a very short time.
I do think, it would be nice to include this functionality into some of the wallet apps or into cardano-wallet/cardano-address. It is not hard. The root key derivation is a very small piece of code.
But I am not a maintainer of any of these. Please raise feature requests with them.
It’s good to hear that it’s not difficult to implement it into existing wallets.
I know each wallet is like separate entity, but it would be nice to have some standart which would ensure that users can access their account no matter what wallet they are using.
I know it’s possible to submit proposals to the Cardano team on a Github or Stack overflow, I’m not sure.
Could you please send me a link?
