How to recover your XELIS Wallet using your seed phrase

• Your 25-word seed phrase, ideally written on paper. Spelling matters; case does not.
• A computer running Windows, macOS, or Linux that meets the system requirements.
• A few minutes of uninterrupted time and a secure internet connection.

Never share your seed phrase with anyone. No support agent, no developer, no exchange will ever ask for it.

If you don't have the wallet yet, install it from the download page. Pick the right build for your OS. Recovery works the same regardless of which device you're recovering on.

On the welcome screen, click Restore from seed (not "Create new wallet" — that would generate a different, empty wallet).

Type the 25 words in order, separated by single spaces. The most common mistakes are:

• Mis-typed words ("recieve" instead of "receive").
• Wrong word order.
• Missing or extra words.

If a word is rejected, double-check your handwriting and try again. Case does not matter; punctuation does not matter.

The password protects the wallet file on this device. It can be different from any previous password — restoring from seed creates a fresh encrypted wallet locally.

Pick something strong (12+ characters, mixed case, numbers, symbols). Store it in a password manager.

The wallet rebuilds its local index from your seed and the live chain. This can take a few minutes depending on your connection and the node you picked.

While it syncs, your balance may temporarily display as 0. Don't panic — wait for sync to finish before drawing conclusions.

• Check that your balance matches what you remember.
• Open your transaction history — past sends and receives should be listed.
• Copy your receive address and compare it to one you've used before, if you remember any.

If all three match, the recovery worked. Move on to security best practices so you're not in this position again.

This is the easiest scenario, and the one almost every long-term user runs into eventually. The wallet password protects only the local encrypted file on this device — it does not protect the funds. If you have the seed phrase, the password is irrelevant.

Don't bother trying to brute-force the existing wallet file. Just delete it (or move it aside), choose Restore from seed on the welcome screen, enter your 25 words, and set a fresh password during recovery. The on-chain balance and history are unchanged. Use a password manager this time.

If your wallet device died or was stolen and you have the seed, recovery is straightforward — but treat the dead device as untrusted for the rest of its life. From a clean machine, install XELIS Wallet, restore from seed, and verify your balance.

If the device was stolen rather than simply dead, the safe move is to recover the wallet, generate a new receive address (Receive tab → New address), and sweep your funds to a freshly created wallet on the recovery machine. The old seed phrase is potentially compromised even if the thief never sees the device awake — a sophisticated attacker can image full-disk-encrypted drives and attempt offline decryption indefinitely. Sweeping into a new seed eliminates that long-tail risk completely.

If you have most of your seed but one or two words are illegible, recovery is still possible — barely. The 25th word is a checksum, so the search space for any single missing word from the official wordlist is small (a few thousand candidates), and a brute-force tool can iterate through them and identify the correct one by validating the checksum.

Beyond two or three missing words, the search space grows exponentially and the practical odds of recovery drop fast. Tools that automate this exist in the broader crypto community, but be extremely careful: any tool that touches a partial seed must run fully offline, on a machine you control, ideally on an air-gapped boot from a live USB. Never paste a partial seed into a website, however official-looking. Many "seed recovery services" are simply theft operations.

If you're in this situation, the safest path is to ask in the official Telegram first for a pointer to a vetted, open-source recovery tool — and to do the work yourself rather than handing the seed to anyone.

Sometimes the device that contains the wallet is still working and unlocked, but the seed-phrase backup is gone (the paper burned, the metal plate was stolen, the safe-deposit box was lost). You have a narrow window: as long as the wallet keeps opening on this device, you can extract a fresh seed.

In XELIS Wallet, go to Settings → Security → Show seed phrase (you'll need to confirm with your wallet password). Write the seed down — twice, in two locations, this time with the discipline of the backup guide. Verify the new written copy by restoring it into a clean wallet on another device. Only then close the open wallet and move on.

If the wallet on the device fails before you can read out the seed — corruption, OS reinstall, hardware failure — and no other backup exists, the funds are gone. This scenario is exactly what the 3-2-1 backup rule prevents.

It is important to be honest about cases where no recovery is possible. The cryptography that makes self-custody trustworthy is the same cryptography that makes loss permanent:

• Seed phrase lost AND no working wallet device anywhere — funds are unrecoverable.
• Funds sent to the wrong address — irreversible by chain design.
• Wallet password forgotten AND seed phrase lost — the encrypted file cannot be decrypted by anyone.
• Seed phrase or signed transaction handed to a phishing site or impersonator — the funds were transferred to the attacker the moment they were signed, and the chain treats that as a legitimate user-authorised transaction.

No XELIS developer, no support volunteer, no third-party "recovery specialist" has any access path that you don't. Anyone who claims otherwise is running a scam. The right takeaway from a loss like this is to apply the lesson to the next wallet: a serious backup discipline, a real threat model, and a tested recovery plan.