Eternl demands 24 words when verifying 15-word Yoroi wallet recovery phrase

English Community Technical Support
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The title might say it all, but I’m posting lots of detail here since I think it’s likely that a workaround for this reproducible issue is known… and also because some people in my user group are worried they can’t confirm the wallets they’re using for a valuable airdrop going on now.

I have a years-old Yoroi 15-word wallet which I migrated into the Eternl browser app wallet & have been using there for over a year now. My records show I verified the 15-word passphrase on the day the wallet was created: accurately and with nothing unusual in the Eternl UI.

I’ve tried to verify the passphrase again now (mainly to ensure the same wallet configuration can be reproduced in Eternl if the wallet is deleted & recreated before that airdrop redemption next year) and now Eternl is demanding 24 words… i.e. you can enter the 15 words, but it leaves 9 blank spaces below them, without being able to “submit” the partial phrase — and without any selection on the screen to notify Eternl a shorter passphrase is being used.

I just verified this again with a newly created, blank Yoroi wallet and the latest version of the Eternl browser app (v2.0.12.7). The wallet imports as expected into Eternl, and the first time selecting Recovery phrase verification from Eternl “Wallet Settings” it asks for & correctly verifies the 15 word phrase… but the next time the browser extension tab opens, and doing this again, it demands 24 words just as it did for my old wallet.

From other forum threads (cc @HeptaSean @Zyroxa) I understand that forum users & moderators have done this before many times. Therefore there must be a commonly known workaround for this problem. The alternative would be that nobody with a “legacy” Yoroi wallet would be able to verify their passphrases in Eternl repeatedly: which seems unlikely.

I do understand that we can “verify” a passphrases by deleting & recreating the wallet… but there are practical reasons why I’d like to avoid suggesting that to others: given some delicate considerations around that airdrop. This is only to enquire about how the Cardano general community has perceived & worked around this reproducible problem: e.g. perhaps:

  • some Eternl setting for the wallet indicating that its keys were produced from a 15-word wallet passphrase;
  • some other setting preventing Eternl from assuming that all its wallets were produced from 24-word passphrases as per the default.
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You found a bug.

Recovery phrase verification is not used that often and people with a mixture of lengths who also try recovery phrase verification are seemingly rare enough that nobody has stumbled about it until now.

In the verification dialog, there is no way to change the seed phrase length. But Eternl doesn’t know the seed phrase length. It just remembers the root key derived from the phrase, but nothing about the phrase itself, not even its length.

So, the verification dialog uses the last length used when adding a wallet.

That is also a work-around: Just start adding a wallet with the correct length. (You don’t even have to start typing anything, just choosing the right length in the “Add Wallet” flow is enough.) The next time, you choose recovery phrase verification for any of your wallets, that is the length it expects.

I’m going to report the bug in Eternl’s Discord.

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Also: You don’t have to delete the wallet beforehand. If the wallet is already present, Eternl will just complain during “Add Wallet” which is indication that the phrase is correct.

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