How to restore a Monero wallet from a seed phrase
Your Monero seed phrase is 25 words (13 for older short seeds). Those words are the wallet. Anyone holding them can spend the funds, and anything less than all of them can leave the wallet unrecoverable. That is the whole security model, and it is also why restoring is mostly about handling those words carefully.
What restoring actually means
A Monero wallet does not contain your coins, it contains the keys that recognize them on the blockchain. Restoring means: load the keys, scan the chain looking for outputs that belong to you, and rebuild your balance. The scanning is the slow part, and how long it takes depends on one thing, the height you start from.
The restore height is the whole game
The restore height is the block number where scanning starts. Two cases:
Created recently, known height. If you know roughly when the wallet was created, scanning starts there and takes minutes. This is why every good wallet asks for an optional creation date or height.
Unknown history, height zero. With no hint, the wallet must scan from the genesis block. On today's Monero chain that is hours on a desktop, sometimes more. It is not optional, it is arithmetic: every output since 2014 has to be checked against your keys.
So if you are restoring a wallet from 2018 and you know it received its first funds in 2021, enter 2021. If you genuinely do not know, start from zero and let it run.
Restoring in xmrwallet
- Open xmrwallet.org and click Import seed.
- Paste your 25-word seed phrase.
- Optionally enter the creation date. xmrwallet converts it to a block height and shows you the estimate before you confirm.
- Leave the height at 0 to scan everything, or trust the date for a fast restore.
- The wallet restores in the background, you can watch the progress, and you get a synced wallet with your full balance.
Because the scanning runs server-side, your browser stays light and the restore keeps going even if you close the tab. The seed is shown to you exactly once at import, then stored AES-256 encrypted.
After the restore: confirmations
Newly received funds show up immediately but are locked for 10 confirmations, roughly 20 minutes on Monero. A healthy wallet shows both numbers: total balance and unlocked (spendable) balance. If your balance shows but will not send, count confirmations first.
Rules that keep restores safe
Never type your seed into a wallet you reached by clicking a link someone sent you. Type the URL yourself. This is the one mistake that cannot be undone.
Check for HTTPS. A seed phrase over plain HTTP can be read in transit. Every wallet worth using redirects to HTTPS.
Prefer wallets whose code you can read. The seed is yours, the wallet handling it should be verifiable. That is the entire reason xmrwallet is open source.
If you have an old seed and no idea of its history, restore from zero somewhere trustworthy, and let it scan. Your patience will be rewarded with everything that wallet ever received.