The Lost Access Triage Sheet
What you still have, what it means, and what not to touch — before you pay anybody.
Almost everything written about lost crypto is written by somebody selling recovery, so it tends to imply that everything is recoverable. It is not. The difference between the two cases is usually knowable within a few minutes, from what you still have, and it costs nothing to find out.
Work through this on paper before you talk to anyone. The second most common way people lose a recoverable wallet is by resetting, reinstalling or overwriting something during a panicked attempt in the first hour. The most common way is paying the wrong person.
First, stop
- Do not reset, reinstall or re-initialise the app or device that holds what is left of the wallet.
- Do not overwrite the backup you have, however wrong it looks. A phrase in the wrong order is evidence. A phrase you have tidied up is not.
- Do not type any part of the phrase into a website, a wallet checker, a support chat, or anything a helpful stranger sends you. Not one word.
- Do not post publicly that you have lost access. Those posts are monitored continuously, and the replies are the scam.
- Do not photograph the phrase onto a phone that backs up to a cloud account.
- Do take a breath. None of this is time-sensitive. The ledger does not expire, and a key that works today works in a year.
Urgency is a sales instrument. Every version of the recovery scam depends on you moving faster than you can check something, so the most protective thing available to you today is a week of not deciding.
What you still have
Fill this in from the things in front of you, not from memory. "I am fairly sure it was twelve words" and "I have counted twelve words" are different answers, and only one of them is useful.
There is deliberately no space on this sheet to write the phrase itself. A worksheet with twelve numbered blanks on it is a seed backup, and it would end up photographed, emailed, or filled in on a phone. A public address is the opposite: it is already on the ledger, anyone can look it up, and writing it here gives away nothing, while being the one piece of information that turns a search into a search with a definite answer.
Inventory — where the fragments physically are
One row per thing that exists. The last column matters more than it looks: a backup nobody has laid eyes on since it was written is a hypothesis, not an asset.
| What it is | Where it physically lives | Legible? Complete? | Seen today |
|---|---|---|---|
Which of these is your situation
Tick anything that describes your case. These are the ones where real work can be done, and the work is arithmetic rather than persuasion.
- All the words, but not the order they go in.
- Handwritten, and one or two words may have been misread.
- You know the passphrase, but not the exact capitalisation or spacing.
- A word or two missing entirely, and you know roughly where.
- The device is dead, lost or wiped, but the phrase exists in some form.
- The phrase restores cleanly, and the wallet shows a zero balance.
That last one deserves a paragraph, because it is the case people give up on first and it is frequently not a lost-key problem at all. A wallet showing nothing is often the software scanning a different derivation path, a different address type, or the wrong chain. The funds are exactly where they were. Trying the same phrase in a second, standards-compliant wallet with the path options exposed resolves a real share of these, and it costs nothing.
And these are the cases nobody can recover
- No phrase, no backup, no fragments. There is nothing to search, and a key cannot be brute-forced from nothing — that is the property the whole system rests on.
- Coins sent to a wrong address, or on the wrong network. If nobody controls the destination they are gone; if an exchange does, it is a support request to them and depends entirely on their policy.
- Locked out of a custodial exchange account. The funds are held by a company, so this is a question of identity, not cryptography, and their support process is the only route.
- Coins stolen, or sent to a scammer. A confirmed transaction cannot be reversed.
If your case is in this list, no tool and no company on earth can change it, and anybody who says otherwise is selling you the second loss. We would rather tell you that here, for free, than take your money to find out. How to spot a recovery scam is the next thing worth reading.
Your answer, in one line
If the honest answer is "unsure", that is a normal place to stop for a week. The longer read is You lost access to a wallet, and what can actually be done. If you land in the recoverable column and want to work through it systematically, the Recovery Attempt Log is the next sheet.
Educational content, not financial advice. This worksheet structures a decision; it does not make one, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy anything. We are not a broker, exchange, custodian or adviser, and we never take custody of your assets. We will never ask for a seed phrase or private key. See the full disclaimer.