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Set Up Wallet Recovery Wizard

Overview

The Wallet Recovery Wizard lets you recover assets from your self-custody wallets, without BitGo. The software enables you to manually withdraw your assets, including sweeping transactions, to different addresses, using the user key and backup key. Recovery transactions bypass any policies you have with BitGo.

You can use the Wallet Recovery Wizard in conjunction with, or without, a key recovery service. To use the software, you must have access to the following:

  • Backup public key
  • BitGo public key, base address, root address, or wallet-contract address (depending on the asset)
  • User public key
  • Wallet passphrase

You can use the Wallet Recovery Wizard in both the test and live environments.

Note: For use in the live environment, BitGo strongly recommends that you use the Wallet Recovery Wizard on an air gapped machine.

View which assets are currently available for use with the Wallet Recovery Wizard in our GitHub repository.

Limitations

The Wallet Recovery Wizard is a self-serve tool that utilizes third-party block explorers to move assets to a new wallet. BitGo doesn't control the limitations of any third-party applications that you may use during wallet recovery. Depending on your use case, you may encounter limitations that require additional steps beyond what's covered by BitGo documentation.

The most likely limitation is API rate-limiting when attempting to broadcast the recovery transaction to the new wallet. When you sweep assets from a wallet, every address in the wallet requires a separate API call. If a wallet has too many addresses, it can encounter a rate-limiting error, preventing an automatic sweep.

Some block explorers have open-source code that you can use without the same rate limiting. For example, Blockstream has rate limiting when sweeping a wallet, but the open-source code that powers it, Esplora, doesn't.

Overcoming the limitations of a third-party block explorer will differ by use case. Block-explorer errors in the Wallet Recovery Wizard include a link to the block explorer for more details. Review the link and the documentation on the block-explorer website to learn more.

Wallet recovery differs by asset, because different blockchains use different block explorers. BitGo recommends reviewing block-explorer specific documentation and choosing ones that work best for your use cases. Understand the limitations of your selected block explorer and, if need be, manage your wallets accordingly (such as limiting the number of address per wallet).

Prerequisites

Steps

1. Download the Wallet Recovery Wizard

This software is available for you to download from our GitHub repository.

2. Read the documentation

The steps differ by asset and use case. Consult the Readme in the GitHub repo for the most up to date step-by-step instructions.

See Also

GitHub Repo: Wallet Recovery Wizard