If your hardware crypto wallet is lost or stolen, your cryptocurrency is safe as long as you have your recovery seed phrase and the thief does not have your PIN (provided that you’re using a hardware wallet that utilizes a PIN).
Your first priority is to use your seed phrase (also called a recovery phrase) to move your assets to a secure, temporary wallet before restoring them to a new hardware wallet. The physical device is replaceable, but your seed phrase is the master key to your funds.
Below, we’ll outline an emergency action plan for securing your crypto and explain what to do if your seed phrase is incomplete.
Lost or Stolen Hardware Wallet: An Action Plan
A hardware wallet adds a layer of physical security to your crypto assets — particularly if you paid for a high-quality device (we don’t directly endorse brands or products, but we’ll note that products from Ledger and Trezor are fairly well-reviewed within the community).
Hardware wallets are designed to restrict access to your crypto. Most devices will wipe themselves after a few incorrect PIN attempts or when tampering is detected — that makes it difficult for bad actors to access your funds (and also creates some novel challenges for data recovery).
However, you can and should take immediate steps to reduce your risk of asset loss.
Follow these steps in order:
- Don’t panic. Whether you’ve got Ether, Bitcoin, Doge, or something else, the crypto itself is not stored on the device — it exists on the blockchain. The wallet only holds the private keys that authorize transactions. As long as your seed phrase is secure, you have full control over your assets.
- Locate your seed phrase. Find the 12, 18, or 24-word seed phrase that you wrote down when you first set up your wallet.
- Set up a temporary software wallet. To move your funds quickly, you will need a temporary “hot wallet.” A hot wallet is a software application that runs on your computer or phone. Choose a reputable software wallet (once again, we don’t recommend specific products, but software wallets like Exodus and MetaMask are commonly used). Make sure you download the software directly from the wallet provider.
Once you’ve got a functional software wallet, you can import the funds from your hardware wallet by following the instructions. We’ve got a slightly more detailed walkthrough here:
Note that software wallets may use different processes to import funds, so refer to the product’s documentation.
After securing your assets, you can simply purchase another hardware wallet and move your assets from the software wallet to the hardware wallet. Remember, the entire point of using crypto is that it’s easy to move securely between different wallets.
Related: How to Recover a Lost Cryptocurrency Wallet
What If I Have a Partial Seed Phrase?
The situation becomes much more complex if your seed phrase backup is damaged or incomplete. You may have a fire-damaged document, a torn piece of paper, or a corrupted file where you can only read a portion of the words (we’ve seen all of these cases in our laboratories).
Fortunately, in many cases, recovery is still possible. Most modern wallets use a standard called BIP39 to generate the seed phrase. A BIP39 seed phrase is generated from a specific list of 2048 words, and it includes a built-in error-checking mechanism called a checksum. The last word of the phrase is mathematically dependent on the previous words.
At Datarecovery.com, we have developed proprietary software and techniques to recover funds from partial seed phrases. Here’s how the process works:
- Analysis: We analyze the information you have, including the words you know, their likely order, and any other potential clues.
- Brute-Force Computation: Our systems programmatically test billions of possible combinations for the missing words by cycling through the official 2048-word BIP39 list.
- Checksum Validation: For each combination, we calculate the checksum. If the checksum is valid, we know we have a potential match. This deterministic feature dramatically narrows the search field and makes recovery feasible.
- Address Verification: If you know one of your public wallet addresses, we can use it to definitively confirm when we have found the correct seed phrase.
Recovering a partial seed phrase is a computationally intensive process that is impossible to perform manually. It’s also difficult to accomplish with home computers — we maintain purpose-built systems that are optimized for these types of cases.
Datarecovery.com provides risk-free evaluations, and we support our crypto recovery services with a no data, no charge guarantee. To learn more, call 1-800-237-4200 or submit a case online.
