Private key lost after wallet restore

Hello,

I re-installed my computer and now wanted to restore my DeFi wallet.

• I installed DeFi App 2.1.4 and restored my wallet with my mnemonic seed (24 words) (working fine)
• I waited until the wallet was fully synchronized (working fine)
• My ETH (-Token) are all there
• Now it shows only 13 DFI instead of ~1600.
• The 1600 DFI are on this address 8F6jenzMBEsiogBmgB9AMDcQJ4EAvCRCns

If I type getaddressinfo 8F6jenzMBEsiogBmgB9AMDcQJ4EAvCRCns it shows: "ismine": false

The private key for the address 8F6jenzMBEsiogBmgB9AMDcQJ4EAvCRCns has not been generated while restoring the wallet.

Any idea what I can do?

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• I already re-installed DeFi App 2.1.4 and tried again, and also installed 2.1.3 and tried there, also no success.
• I did not make any backup of the old DeFi wallet as only the mnemonic seed is needed to generate all private keys. Windows 10 Pro 2004 app.log binary.log

[PhilippRieth]

I can’t answer all your questions, but UTXO rescans/rebuilds the blockchain and searches for any transactions that contain addresses you own, so it can show you your full balance (Is this correct?).

As @izzycsy mentioned, it’s good practice to backup the seed + the do backup wallet as there could always be bugs in the code

Well, backup wallet is not a requirement, but sometimes you’ll never know what kind of bugs might happen, so I feel it’s sort of a safety net to do backups every now and then. Personally, I do so before I updating the app (eg. to v2.1.5).

The 24 words should be enough to backup, if the wallet works correctly.

@salomonkarsten I still recommend to do the getaddressinfo <your-address> "is mine": true/false check. This can always be done, even with a not fully synced blockchain. If it says true for all addresses, just wait until it’s fully synced and check with listaccounts {} true true true and gettokenbalances {} true true and getbalance your token/coin balances.

[PhilippRieth]

Do you know the address on which your coins are on? If so, type getaddressinfo <your-address> in the CLI for each of your addresses and check if it says "ismine": false or "ismine": true.

• If it says true, you still do have access to the coins on that address, and it just doesn’t display your funds correctly in the app
• If it says false, you do not have the private key to the address anymore, thus you are not able to access funds on that address

Edit: if it says "ismine": true for your addresses, your problem is probably to related to the problem described in this issue.

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It is not 100% clear yet if you are able to restore all private keys in the wallet.dat file with your 24 word seed.

Your 24 word seed is pretty much just one large private key, from which you are able to generate lots of child private keys (millions). For more info google Bitcoin HD-Wallet (BIP-32).

24 words -> extended private key -> lots of child private keys -> public key -> address (legacy or standard format, see DeFi wiki)

To me it seems like that not all private keys (addresses used) are generated via the extended private key. Private keys which are not generated via the extended private key (24 words) are only stored locally in the wallet.dat file.
That’s why that file currently more important than the 24 words.

With the extended private key you are able to restore some private keys (access to addresses). What the wallet restore progress does is, it generated ~2000 private keys + address (m/0'/0'/0' to m/0'/0'/999' and m/0'/1'/0' to m/0'/1'/999') from your extended private key (24 words), and stores them in your wallet.dat file. The wallet should then use only address from those that have been generated via the ext. priv. key.

It currently seems like that some addresses used by the app are not part of the 2000 generated ones from the ext. priv. key. That means, once you lose the wallet.dat file you won’t be able to restore the private keys for those addresses again.

I have no proof that my claim is true! I’m still testing and trying to replicate the problem