How to recover your Tezos from ICO

6 min readFeb 11, 2019

It has been a long time since the Tezos ICO ended and still, 26% of the total ICO balance has not been activated. In the following tutorial, we decided to explain to you how to recover your Tezos from the ICO, install a Tezbox Wallet and start earning interests on your stake thanks to baking.

Our goal is to help the community as much as possible and share with you all the steps so that you don’t get a headache. 🤓

If you have participated in the ICO and have some Tezzies waiting to be claimed and baked, here are the several items you will need in order to recover them:

The seed phrase from the ICO contribution that can be found on the PDF
The password you used for the ICO
The email address you used when you signed up for the ICO
Your public key - It should begin with “tz1”

NOTE: This is not your private key, which you should absolutely keep private.

The activation code you received after completing the KYC/AML verification process

For the side story, this KYC/AML verification process has been very controversial around the Tezos community. Some such as TzLibre even tried to fork the coin as they were against providing personal information.

Given today’s regulatory atmosphere, the Tezos team wanted to remain as compliant as possible with the different regulatory bodies — among which the SEC.

Anyway, let’s get back to our subject. If you want access to your Tezos from the ICO, you have to complete the KYC process. Once you do, Tokensoft will email an activation code for each public key you provide.

Before proceeding to the KYC/AML step, you can also check your contribution to see how many Tezzies you received during the ICO using your public key on check.tezos.com.

Register for the KYC/AML process

In order to proceed with the KYC/AML process, you need to register on the website called: verification.tezos.com

Once you have completed the KYC/AML process, you should receive an activation code. You will also be able to check this information on the website directly.

Activaꜩ

Once you have received your activation code (it can take a few days for the KYC process to complete), you need to activate your Tezos address. Unfortunately, you need to have your activation code before being able to merge your ICO holding with the Mainnet.

The easiest way to activate your ICO wallet is to go on Activaꜩ. Then, you only need to provide your public (NOT the private!!) key and the activation code.

activaTez - genesis address activation

activaTez is a simple tool designed to activate your genesis allocation

stephenandrews.github.io

If you did everything correctly, your ICO Tezzies will be added into the Tezos public blockchain. You can visit tzscan.io and enter your public key to check if everything worked properly.

Normally, at this point, the only thing that you need to do is to create a wallet and start to bake your XTZ.

You can check this article if you have a Ledger Nano S and need to know how to install a Tezos wallet on it.

There are some other wallets such as Galleon, Kaiko or even Magnum wallet but on this guide, we decided to use the Tezbox wallet as an example.

By the way, you do not need to move your Tezzies right now into a wallet. Once they are baked in the public blockchain, they are safe. But if you want to delegate some of your Tezzies, you need a wallet.

Tezbox Wallet

Open Chrome or Firefox and visit the Tezbox website. You can install the desktop version or simply use the online wallet if you prefer that.

When you are on the Tezbox wallet you will have the ability to restore a wallet or to create a new one.

Of course, what you want is to restore the wallet from your ICO so just choose “restore”.

You have several ways available to restore your wallet from a Seed Phrase, from a Private Key, or from an ICO wallet. Choose the last one.

Enter the required information: the seed phrase, password and email address from the ICO. For this step, the activation code is optional.

Finally, Tezbox will prompt you for a password to encrypt the wallet so make sure it is a complex password. And tada! 👏

Once you open the wallet, the balance displayed should be the same as what was shown on tzscan.io. If so, you are almost done! Congratulations!

Delegate your Tezos using POS Bakerz

The last step is to find a delegator/baker that will pay you rewards on your holdings. You can check this guide to find info on how to delegate or just follow the rest of the tutorial :)

To delegate your Tezos you need to create a KT address that will allow you to delegate your XTZ. It’s not possible to delegate directly using a tz1 address.

To do that just click on Add Account, you need some Tezos to validate the address and to pay the small creation fee linked to it (~0.260XTZ).

Once your KT address is created you need to send some funds to it!

This part is important. Delegators do not need to hold custody of their clients. The funds should be sent to your own KT address and not directly to your baker.

It should take a few cycles before you are able to see your balance and start to earn interest on your holding thanks to delegation services.

When your funds arrived on your KT address, the only things you need now is to choose the right baker for you.

Go on Delegate.

Open the Delegate Options and choose “Custom”.

Now, you only need to enter POS Bakerz Baking address in the “Custom Delegate” case:

tz1Vyuu4EJ5Nym4JcrfRLnp3hpaq1DSEp1Ke

When delegating, the funds are always yours and you are able to move them at any time you want or to delegate with another baker as soon as you decide.

If the operation has been a success you can verify it using TzScan. Under delegate, if the operation is successful you should see “True” next to “Delegatable” and the Baker address next to “Delegate”.

To check if your earnings are coming on your account, we advise you to use Baking Bad service if you want to receive a message every time a payment is done on your address by the baker.

This is it, now you just have to relax and start to earn interest on your Tezos.

*Please allow 7 cycles before receiving the rewards from your delegation. (You can check this article if you want to know more about this)

NOTE: These instructions only apply to people who bought Tezos tokens (XTZ) during the ICO. The Tezos network is now in Mainnet, and the ICO tokens can be moved out of storage into your personal wallet now.

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