Step by step guide: restore your Mycelium seed phrase to Electrum
Mycelium is one of the most common Android Bitcoin wallets out there. If for some reason you bricked your mobile phone or simply want to manage your funds via Electrum, this guide is for you.
When you initially generate a new wallet in the Mycelium app, you will be prompted to backup your seed phrase. Once you start the backup process, Mycelium will display 1 word at a time, as shown in the screenshot below
If you’ve written down this seed phrase, your funds are safe and you will be able to restore them in almost any other wallet application
To recover your funds on Electrum, you first need to download it and preferably verify the executable signature.
When you launch Electrum you will be prompted with the option to open an existing wallet file or creating a fresh wallet. We will be creating a fresh one either by leaving the default default_wallet value or with any other wallet name we choose
Next we choose to use a Standard Wallet
And finally we choose the ‘I already have a seed’ option
We then type in our 12 word seed phrase into the box and click on the Options button and check the BIP39 seed checkbox. If all goes well you should see a checksum: ok message as shown in the screenshot
After importing the seed phrase, we are presented with two options - we can either let Electrum automatically scan for the funds in the various derivation paths, or we can manually set the derivation path we would like to recover. For simplicity purposes, we will choose the ‘Detect Existing Accounts’ option.
Electrum will spend some time searching for the correct derivation path and will present you with the accounts it found under your seed phrase
After selecting the account, Electrum will finally launch and you should be able to see your funds available.
Need help?
We at Brute Brothers have special software and hardware to help recover lost passwords or partial seed phrases for Electrum and Mycelium users. Contact us at sos@brutebrothers.com (PGP) for more details.
