Hello, I had to reinstall metamask and re-enter my 12 word key phrase in order to enter the metamask wallet.
Metamask automatically recovered the first (original wallet) and using the “Create Account” option I was able to recover 5 other wallets (they all had previous ETH transactions).
however it seems that Metamask is ETH based and will not recover any other wallet under the same seed phrase unless It had previous ETH transaction.
The rest of the wallets I aimed to recover had no ETH transactions at all, they only had BNB transactions instead.
Not only metamask did not recover them but it created entirely new blank wallets with no ETH & BNB transaction history. (checked on Etherscan and bscscan).
If I would have known this to be the case or if there was a warning, I would have exported all the private keys from all my accounts and wrote them down but I believed that a seed phrase would be enough.
Has anyone else had the same prooblem? and does sending ETH to those wallets helped metamask read and recover them?
Hello all, I also noticed this possible problem, as a beginner in the field, you should know that each wallet creates, this creates a private key for each of them, I noticed on each profile to select, the private key changes in the settings.
unfortunately, if you haven’t saved the keys, your money is stuck in the blockchain :-(.
the developers should add a note in the application, thanks to them.
Cordially
Hey! So as long as you had your seed and and restored the wallet (which sounds like you did) you’re fine. You will need to manually add back in networks and some tokens.
Check out this article from MetaMask Knowledge Base, it includes hyperlinks with two options on how to add back in the networks you had. As long as this was the same wallet you used BSC with, it’s all still there.
You’re correct, once you see the correct Ethereum address, your BSC will be there. Confirming you have not come across the matching Ethereum address yet?
All accounts get restored in the same order, regardless if there were Ethereum transactions or not. An address could have only Polygon transactions and it would still be restored if there was no Ethereum transactions. When the wallet was restored, only the Ethereum Mainnet account would show up but once the user adds the Polygon Network and switches over to it, they’d see their funds on Polygon. If they had more then MATIC, they might have to manually add in the tokens but they’d still be there.
Another example, if you had 10 accounts in your wallet and you only had Polygon transactions on wallet 10 (and no transactions on Ethereum on any wallets) you’d just keep clicking “create account” until you’re at the 10th account created. You’d also want to add the Polygon Network and switch over to it. Once that is complete, you’re in the same 10th wallet.
Couple questions just to confirm -
Did you import any private keys from another wallet by any chance?
Are you sure the Secret Recovery Phrase you are using is for the wallet you had transactions on BSC for?
If all the above checks out here are two options that come to mind -
contact a live agent at help desk. To do this go to support.metamask.io and click the blue “start a conversation” large square bubble
Once you choose this, it will connect you to a bot initially but as you click through answers you will get to a live agent.
you can review this Knowledge Base article that shares the mnemonic account generator . You’re able to generate 10 to 100 accounts and check if the missing accounts are in that list.
Both eth and bsc accounts have the same address, the accounts i am adding after the 5th account have no previous transaction in both eth and bsc (checked on both explorers)
Did you import any private keys from another wallet by any chance?
I did but ended up not using it.
Are you sure the Secret Recovery Phrase you are using is for the wallet you had transactions on BSC for?
Yes I am sure, I had the recovery phase written down.
*This all happened because of a Chrome update that ended up in a bug where Chrome would close after 2 sec of opening the browser window each time, after looking for a solution online i was told to rename the “default” folder in C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
to “backup default”
It helped but metamask got reset and i had to use the recovery phrase to enter again.
*I have spoken with support but that didn’t help, i gave my email and was told that the tech team will contact me shortly (have not yet) , I also gave details such as account addresses of the wallets i aim to recover.
Thanks for coming back and providing all this detail.
Can you try to import the private keys you had imported before just in case? Or if you don’t want to import them, can you check out the account that links to?
Sorry if you’ve done all this. Just trying to comb through the details so as this gets passed along we can share what you’ve tried.
Found a solution, All accounts and funds recovered!
https ://youtu.be/Lhwv-qI5j9w
Found the solution on this video,
Followed each step and enabled “show hidden folders” to get to the folders in C:\Users\USER_NAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Local Extension Settings\nkbihfbeogaeaoehlefnkodbefgpgknn
Then reinstalled chrome and metamask and got my old account back, apparently It also had a different seed phrase and not the one I used, I didn’t have access to that one but it doesn’t matter with this method.
For future use I will save my private keys from the wallets for extra security.
Great, glad you found a solution! Typically when this situation comes up it is because users are using an incorrect/different secret recovery phrase like you had happen. As you said, make sure all your seed phrases are written down on a paper somewhere safe.
If you have your secret recovery phrase, it will restore all accounts within the wallet the secret recovery phrase was for, on all networks.
You can think of the secret recovery phrase as a keyring that holds all your private keys. This is a great article from the MetaMask Knowledge Base to reference for more information :
Just want to share, there are some things in that video that aren’t necessarily best practice. You don’t want to save your secret recovery phrase on cloud storage, this is not safe. The video creator says not to waste your time writing down the secret recovery phrase, this also is not safe practice.
Glad this all had a happy outcome for the OP, but want to also share so we’re all following safest practice.
