My seed restores but the wallet is empty
If the ceremony told you your key is fine but the script type is wrong, here is what happened and how to fix it.
Your coins are where they always were. What changed is which of four doors the software is looking through.
Why one seed opens four wallets
Your twelve words are not the address. They are the root that addresses are derived from, and there are four standard ways to do that derivation, each defined by its own specification:
- BIP-44 — addresses starting with
1 - BIP-49 — starting with
3 - BIP-84 — starting with
bc1q - BIP-86 — starting with
bc1p
All four are valid and all four are real. Your seed opens every one of them. If the software you are restoring into uses a different one than the software that created the seed, you get a wallet that is legitimate, functional and empty — because your coins are sitting in one of the other three.
Nothing warns you, because from the software's point of view nothing went wrong: it derived correct addresses and none of them has a balance.
How to fix it
- Work out which wallet originally created the seed. Brand and rough year is enough.
- In the software you are restoring into, find the address type, format, or derivation path option. Most have it, sometimes under "advanced".
- Try all four. There is no risk in trying: deriving addresses moves nothing and spends nothing.
- If your software won't let you choose, use one that will — Electrum and Sparrow both expose it — or check with a watch-only wallet using the extended public key.
One warning. While searching for this you will find services offering to "recover" your wallet. None of them needs your seed for any of the steps above, because all of it happens on your own computer. Anyone asking for it is asking for the whole wallet. There is no legitimate situation in which another person needs your twelve words.
Once you find it
Write two more lines next to your words, in the same place: which wallet created the seed, and what year. They cannot spend a single satoshi, and they are exactly what was missing today. The next time anyone restores this — you, or whoever comes after you — those two lines save this entire afternoon.