For several months I thought my Cardano was gone for good. I had sent my ADA from an exchange to my infinito wallet because at that time it was the only mobile wallet I could find that supported ADA. I sent a test then the whole thing, it was fine. Then I either got a new phone or infinito created a new wallet without me knowing. Right before Shelley took place. I looked for my ADA and it was gone. Infinito employee told me no worries it’ll be there after Shelley is done. But it was not! Apparently either during the Shelley upgrade or the downloading the infinito wallet app on my new phone using the same email and password they had replaced my old wallet for a new one with zero cardano on it! No notification that this occurred other than the wallet addresses were wrong! So I tried to reopen my old wallet in their “Add More Wallets” area. It crashed and closed the app every time I got to the 7th or 8th word! I created a support ticket and all the employee told me was that I had zero funds on the blockchain explorer. No help. So then I tried other wallets that had cardano support like Exodus but my seed words did not open my wallet. It did open a new empty wallet but not the one with my ADA on it. I went back and tried Infinito again and it finally let me input all my words without crashing and I now have my ADA back! YES!
Now I have questions! Are Key words specific to the wallet app? It appears so to me because using the correct words for infinito do not open the same wallet in exodus. I also tried this with Digibyte key words into Exodus and it also did not open my correct digibyte address. Neither experiment rejected the key words, it just opened new empty wallets. I would think that key words should access your crypto from any wallet that support your crypto.
Lastly My ADA is still in a Byron wallet. How do I convert that into my Shelley wallet?
Seed words are on the blockchain, you can access your same funds in any wallet that supports ada. However if a wallet like Infinito have seed words that are not compatible with other wallets supporting ada, then you don’t actually have the seed words to the private keys protecting your ada.
It sounds like Infinito own your ada and have the real seed words to the private keys. They have then given you some other words they made up, so they can link those words to the ada they own. (That explains why your ada disappeared for some time)
My question here is, why do you keep trying different third party wallets? Exodus is not an official wallet and has no support from the official entities. Exodus will have their own employees or devs that work on the wallet, these people will have no affiliation with Cardano.
Yoroi is an official light client which works on computer and mobile
Daedalus is an official full node client which works on computer.
You can restore your same seed in both those wallet clients.
Now to move your ada from a byron address to a shelley address, firstly i would strongly recommend starting again in one of the official wallets mentioned above. (You have had far to many issues with third party clients).
If your seeds do not work in either official wallet, then just create a shelley era wallet through daedalus or yoroi and send your funds to it.
That’s real nice of them to do that with seed words. So you think you own it, but you don’t.
At the time I think there was only the Daedalus wallet and it needs windows 10 but I only have windows 7. So I kept my ADA on the exchange for a long time until I found Infinito. It wasn’t a huge amount but also not an amount I’d want to lose. Especially now that the price has gone up so much. I have a ledger nano but they still don’t have ADA in the ledger manager so I can add that account, yet they have the app available to install on the hardware? It’s been that way for a long time too.
By the way, what are the odds of generating a new wallet that happens to be someone else’s with funds in it? If it’s generated randomly couldn’t it accidentally generate someone else’s wallet? I know the chances are supposed to be slim. But if it’s just random it is still a possibility? Or does the system know what keys are taken and so generates something different every time?
I can’t get my ada out of my Infintito wallet either. Not able to send. Just getting “system error”. I’ve contacted support but no reply. Anyone here have any suggestions?