How to Recover Funds from a 2018 Daedalus Seed Phrase and Private Key

Staking & Delegation Stake Delegation
1

Hello, I found my private key and seed phrase from a Daedalus wallet I was running in 2017/2018

Ask1: Can I use this seed phrase and/or private key to access my funds from a modern Daedalus wallet today?
Ask2: Is there a migration path I have to follow? I think there was a Byron to Shelly migration since 2018 and today.

Do I need this secret.key file too? Hope the seed phrase and pkey are enough.

If this was the code behind the Daedalus wallet I was running, that puts me at about 0.7.0 to 0.9.0 which is pretty old at this point.

Is what this person said (Reddit) accurate?

Get the private keys. Uninstall daedalus. Re-install daedalus. Enter private keys. Wallet should sync normally

and

If you have your 12 word key… just uninstall and re-install with the latest release

Right now I have a new ADA wallet on an exchange. I can install Daedalus again. I don’t have a hardware cold storage wallet ready yet but could do that soon.

Thanks team

2

Did some reading, I think I need to create a Shelley era wallet and then send ADA from the Byron wallet to Shelley wallet. Correct?

Do not attempt using the byron seed phrase when creating a Shelley wallet.

I don’t have a byron wallet anymore, so I think I can create one (using seed phrase) in YOROI like this article says

This article also was a good insturction on what not to do:
I made the mistake of trying to restore a wallet using the seed phrase from my Byron era wallet. This is incorrect as a Shelley wallet is an entirely different wallet.

3

First, how many words has your byron seed words? 12 or 15? Understand 12 being a daedalus wallet… so u will need to restore on:

Try to restore the wallet using the 12 seed words on adalite.io (more faster) and check if u see the correct balance

If not then u should search for the secret.key file located to :

Windows:

C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Daedalus

macOS:

/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Daedalus

Linux:

~/.local/share/Daedalus/mainnet

Install a new daedalus version and use import option (import from secret.key)
Wait for the wallet to sync and check the balance

Once u recovered the byron wallet u will need to create a new shelley wallet (daedalus or yoroi) and transfer the funds from byron to shelley (try a small amount first)

PS: don’t forget to bkp the new shelley seed words

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/forum abc