The Ledger NANO S ETH or ERC20 lost fund emergency guide.

1 Do not panic

You remember you sent some ETH or erc20 tokens to your ledger ages ago, but you had to do a firmware update or restore your seed with the 24 words mnemonic and your coins are not showing up? Don’t Panic!

Do not start entering your seeds on any shady website to get back your funds. www.sendmeyour24wordsandIwillsendyoubackyourcoins.com is probably not a legit website. This guide will approach your problem in a methodical way to try to get your funds back.

2 Are the coins still there

If you withdraw the coins from an exchange there are chances that you have an email or receipt with the withdrawal information. Try to find out in which address you sent the funds to.

An ETH address should start by 0x and look like this:

0x47C857f3e9771772Ded08D7FD376Df84575Dbab9

With the help of block explorer like https://etherscan.io/ you can check how many ETH or tokens are stored at one address on the blockchain.

Coins are still there? Good, proceed to step 3

Coins are not there, or were moved. Then we have a problem, maybe your key was compromised (have you ever typed those 24 words on a keyboard? Have you ever taken a picture with the words in it?)

I can advice to do a time-framed search of your emails for the dates around which the coins were moved, maybe you moved the coins to an exchange or paid your VPN subscription with your coins and forgot about it.

On Gmail if your funds were lost on 01/02/2019 you can try this search

“after:2019/01/01 before:2019/01/03”

I hope you do not find an email from CZ there telling you to send him 1ETH for him to send you 10ETH back because if you do, I have bad news from you.

3 Restore the ledger master seed

The way I see it the point of the ledger and any hardware wallet is to be a black box that contains your private keys. The only time the private should go out of the black box is at the initialisation when you write the 24 words with a pen on good old paper (to avoid key-loggers).

24 words

If you initialized your ledger correctly you should have a list of 24 words called mnemonic. This mnemonic is the master seed that can be used to compute all the private keys associated with your wallet.

All the words you have should be in this list of 5000 words. Other languages are available here. If one of the words you have is not on this list, then you must have mis-wrote it and should try to find similar word that is in the list.

The order of the words matter, switching place just two words with each other won’t create the same seed at all.

There is a checksum that check the validity of your 24 words but it is not fail proof, there is about a 1 in 256 chance that getting a word wrong will still give you a perfectly valid but different seed as the one you used before.

There is a great tool all in javascript https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ that is very helpful to understand how mnemonics works. You should definitely not use this website with your real 24 words. You could have a malware on you computer that is sending to a hacker everything you type on your keyboard.

You managed to restore the ledger with your 24 word? Good, proceed.

passphrase

There is an extra bit of security we need to check. Ledger allow the user to add a passphrase to your master seed. Think of it like a 25th word that you choose. The only restriction on it for the ledger is a character limit of 100.

To restore the same master seed if you used a passphrase/25th word you are going to need to restore this exact same passphrase either attach it to a pin or unlock it temporarily.

There has been case before of people who could not find their funds on the ledger anymore and it was because they forgot that they had used a 25th word.

There are no “wrong” passphrases. Every passphrase leads to some wallet, which unless previously used will be empty.

4 Derivation PATH

Derivation PATH are those cryptic strings of characters that looks like this

m/44'/60'/0'/0/0

Thinks of it like a list of operations that you apply to the master seed that will transform it in the private key of a specific address.

A commun interpretation of the this derivation PATH would be

m(master seed)/ purpose' / coin_type' / account' / chain / address_index

Chances are that if you restored your ledger with the right 24 words and the right optional passphrase that what you need to find your funds is to find the right derivation path that creates the private key associated with the original address you sent your funds to.

I found that a good way to start finding the right derivation PATH is to use the vintage version of MyEtherWallet website at

vintage.myetherwallet.com

At this step you should have reinstalled the ETH application on the restored ledger with the ledger manager in ledger live.

Upon opening the website and unlocking your ledger you should access this screen.

Try the different radio buttons to see if one of them lead to the right ETH address you are looking for. You can check for the address or the ETH amounts if you know one of the address should contain some ETH.

The two most likely derivation path are the first two radio-buttons:

m/44'/60'/0'/0 and m/44'/60'/0'

You can also try the More addresses button in case the default address did not work.

I hope you got your coins back.