Hi, this question has been asked before, but so far I haven’t found an answer that would work for me.
I used Atomic wallet about 5 years ago, and used it exclusively for ADA. I remember saving my private key (Shelley) and address (but not my 12-word seed phrase to the wallet itself!) and just let them sit in my documents folder and forgot about them until last week. I decided to check my balance and lo and behold I have over $1k on my address, but… no way to import my wallet anywhere? I tried guarda and exodus and received errors that the key is invalid, yet I know for certain that it IS valid, since I have a qr code of it.
So, any suggestions as to how to import the wallet using just the private key? Any advice would be much appreciated!
Can’t you import them into Atomic again? They should know best in what format they saved what there.
Importing by private key (instead of seed phrase) is not really usual among Cardano wallet apps.
Eternl can do it, but only the .skey files used by the command line cardano-cli tool. So, you would first need to know how to convert whatever Atomic has given you there into that.
“This is a private key.” is not really enough information.
Yeah, that’s the gist of it. Since I am absolutely zero at developing anything, I guess it would make sense to pay someone to make a tool to generate .skey files or seed phrases from private keys? Unless such a tool already exists and is publicly available.
Did something similar a few months ago for BC Vault which is a hardware wallet that also only displays a private key as an export/backup:
That one was quite lucky, though. It turned out that what they display there was pretty exactly what was wanted in the .skey files (just with the addition of a few header bytes).
That could also be the case for Atomic, but doesn’t have to be. We also had cases where wallet apps displayed something as allegedly “the” private key and nobody ever found out what exactly that is.
Looks like it won’t work for me, my private key is in a completely different, looks like this:
xprv1mrcywmua***ssm6tcq2tyhy and is 165 characters long. I thought that maybe it’s an old format that is no longer used by Atomic, but I created a test wallet and it has the exact same address types.
Run uv run --script atomicxprv2skey.py (should install everything it needs on the fly, or use some other way to install pycardano – which is needed as a dependency – and run the script).
It asks you for the xprv1… and then writes two files in the current directoy – payment.skey and stake.skey.
