There are two ways to move a wallet, and they are not two routes to the same result. Entering the recovery phrase into a new app means getting a second key to the same address: nothing changes on the blockchain and there is nothing to pay for. Sending the coins over the network means actually moving: the address becomes a different one, and a fee is charged for every transfer in every network.
We will say it up front, because a platform account comes up for comparison below: we are an exchange service. Choosing between the two is simple. Changing app or phone — importing the phrase is enough. Someone else has seen the phrase — importing does not help at all: you need a new wallet with a new phrase and a transfer over the network.
And from a custodial account — a platform account or the custodial Telegram wallet — you cannot move by importing: you do not have the private key.
An empty screen after an import usually does not mean the money has been stolen. There are six reasons, and five of them are about the app rather than the blockchain: a different key derivation path, the money sitting on a second account, an account set up with a private key, a token that has not been added, a network that has not been added. The sixth is TON, where the key is derived by a different standard.
The passphrase stands apart, if one was ever set. The first thing to do is to check the old address in an explorer.
Two operations that go by one name
Importing the recovery phrase means computing the same keys in a different app. Sending over the network is a transaction after which the coins sit at a different address. The consequences are opposite.
feature | importing the recovery phrase | sending over the network |
|---|---|---|
What happens on the blockchain | nothing | a transaction for every token in every network |
Address | the same one | a new one |
Price | 0 | a fee for every transfer |
Time | minutes to type the words in | network time plus confirmations |
The old wallet | keeps working | keeps working, but empty |
Allowances granted by | stay in force | stay on the old address |
Staked and delegated | stays available | does not move at all |
Risk | the old copy of the phrase works for ever | a mistake in the address is irreversible |
From a custodial account | impossible | the only way |
Typing the same words into a different app is not a move but a second key to the same flat. It becomes a move once the money has gone to an address from a new phrase.
Hence the rule for choosing.
- You are changing app or phone. An import is enough: not a single operation will take place on the blockchain, and there is nothing to pay for.
- Someone else may have seen the phrase. An import does not help: the old copy of the words remains a working key. You need a new wallet with a new phrase and a transfer over the network.
- The money is on a custodial account. There is nothing to import — you do not have the key. That leaves withdrawing over the network.
“The balance vanished after the import”: six reasons
The first thing to do is not to reinstall and not to go looking for a “recovery service”, but to check the old address in an explorer. The old one specifically: in reason no. 1 the new app is showing a different one. If the address was not written down, it is in the transfer history, on the recipient's deposit page or in the correspondence with the sender.
An explorer shows what is written on the blockchain; an app shows only what it has managed to find. How to read a transfer page is covered separately: checking a transfer in an explorer.
1. The app supports only one key derivation path
A recovery phrase is not a store of coins but the input data for computing keys. The path for that computation is set by the BIP-44 standard: m / purpose' / coin_type' / account' / change / address_index, and the network number comes from a shared registry — Ethereum 60, TRON 195. A different number gives different keys from the same words, and that is by design.
If the previous app computed the keys along a different path, the new one will show an empty account. MetaMask says so plainly: when you enter a recovery phrase, only the default path is supported, m/44'/60'/0'/0, and a path can only be chosen when a hardware device is connected. We are not giving a “wallet → path” table: one path for one wallet is all that has been confirmed.
What cures this is, on the confirmed evidence, unknown: there is no working method in the sources, and we are not going to invent one. The address itself is intact and the coins on it are visible in an explorer — it is only the app that cannot see them.
2. The money is on the second or the fourth account
An app usually shows the first account. The rest are created from the same phrase by hand and in order — you cannot jump straight to the fourth. The consoling part: addresses are derived deterministically, so when you create them again they will be the same ones.
3. The account was set up with a private key
Accounts added with a private key or a JSON file are not derived from the phrase and will not be pulled in automatically — that is how MetaMask puts it. They are added again the same way they were set up. The same goes for a connected hardware wallet: you connect it again, the phrase will not bring it back.
4. The token has not been added
The balance is where it was, but the app does not know what to look at: custom tokens have to be added again after a recovery. The vendor lists this among the reasons for “the phrase restored the wrong account”. The network's own coin is visible; the token at the very same address is not.
5. The network has not been added
A fresh installation counts as a new copy of the app and keeps no local data: networks added by hand have to be added again. One single 0x… address lives on many EVM networks, and until the network you need is connected, its balance is not visible. Covered separately: the transfer went to the wrong network.
6. TON: the same words give a different key
This is the trap for confident users. TON takes its words from the same BIP-39 list but derives the key from them differently: PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 with the salt TON default seed and 100,000 iterations, against the salt mnemonic and 2,048 iterations in BIP-39. The familiar twenty-four words give a different key — and that is not a typing error.
The second half of the reason is the address itself. On TON it is computed from the wallet contract's code and data: account_id = hash(initial_code, initial_data). It follows that different wallet versions with the same key give different addresses. There is no sentence in the documentation that states outright “the version changes the address” — this is a conclusion drawn from the specification, not a vendor's position.
And a caveat from the TON documentation itself: some apps in the ecosystem may derive the key in another way. The list has not been published, so the warning can only be given in general terms. For the same reason it is impossible to promise that the address will match when a phrase is moved between TON wallets: the vendor writes about import being supported but says nothing about addresses matching.
The passphrase: the “twenty-fifth word”
If a passphrase was set when the wallet was created, the words on their own are not enough to recover it. It is not part of the phrase and is not stored alongside it: the device does not remember it, and it cannot be changed, removed or recovered. Capitalisation in it matters.
Where it comes from: the BIP-39 standard allows a passphrase, and a hardware wallet maker describes it in detail. An ordinary phone app may have no such setting at all — in which case you never set one.
The main property: there is no such thing as a “wrong” passphrase — only a different one. Any string gives a valid wallet, a typo and an empty string included. The manufacturer puts it plainly: every passphrase entered creates a different wallet, even if it is a slip of the finger.
What that means for anyone staring at an empty screen: an empty wallet proves nothing. It may not be “yours, robbed”, but a different one that is legitimately empty.
What moves across and what does not
What moves are the keys, and with them the addresses and everything sitting on them on the blockchain. The rest lives in the app on one particular device and does not appear after an import.
what | does it move |
|---|---|
addresses and the coins on them | yes, the address is the same |
NFTs and tokens at the address | yes, they are on the blockchain |
account names and labels | no |
the list of added tokens | no, add them again |
the list of added networks | no, add them again |
the transaction history in the app | no, that is local data |
connections to sites and apps | no |
token visibility settings | no |
accounts set up with a private key | no |
connected hardware | no, connect it again |
allowances granted by | yes — and that is not always a good thing |
staked and delegated | no, not when sending over the network |
the app's internal bonuses | no |
A word on the transaction history: it frightens people most, because it looks like a loss. On the blockchain it has not gone anywhere — all that has gone is its local list inside the app.
After an import the old wallet stays fully usable
An import copies access; it does not transfer it. Three consequences follow, and every one of them costs money.
The first is the limit of the safe advice. If the reason for moving is a new app or a new phone, an import is enough. If someone else has seen the phrase, an import does not solve the problem at all: the old copy of the words remains a working key. What to do about an exposed phrase — in a separate write-up.
The second is allowances. An approve allowance is written into the token's contract and tied to an “owner — spender” pair on a single network. An import does not change the address, so every allowance granted earlier stays in force, and the new app neither knows about them nor shows them. When you send to a new address they do not move across, but nor do they disappear — they hang on the old one.
So the advice that “once you have moved, the old allowances no longer matter” has to be withdrawn outright. They matter for exactly as long as even one token could turn up at the old address. They have to be revoked separately for every token, at every address and on every network: an allowance covers one token on one network. Disconnecting the wallet from a site does not cancel an allowance, and a hardware wallet does not protect you from it.
The third: deleting changes nothing on the blockchain. A wallet vendor writes it literally: a wallet, or information about it, cannot be deleted from the blockchain; deleting removes the wallet from the app only. The key exists for as long as the phrase exists.
What does not move at all: staking, delegation, frozen funds
Resources are tied to an account, not to a person. When you send to a new address over the network, staked TRX stays on the old one, and the only way to get it back is by unfreezing. The unfreezing period is a network parameter: a direct query to a TRON node on 19.09.2026 returns 14 days. Delegated energy and votes also stay on the old address.
The same holds for positions in apps: deposits, staking, collateral. Revoking allowances has no effect on them at all — that is a different operation, and it has nothing to do with deposited tokens.
The order depends on why you are moving. A planned move: unfreeze first, wait out the period, then send — otherwise you learn about the two weeks only after you have already sent everything else to the new address.
If someone else has seen the phrase, the order is the other way round. On a compromised phrase the vendor writes “act immediately”, and you cannot wait fourteen days with money sitting at an exposed address: first move out everything liquid, and unwind the stake afterwards. And the 14 days here is a network parameter on the day of the measurement, not a promise of a deadline.
You cannot move from a custodial account by importing
There is nothing to import there: no recovery phrase exists, and the private key belongs to the operator. The wallet's help puts it plainly: a private key is required, and the customer does not have one. That leaves withdrawing over the network, at the platform's tariff and minimum.
A caveat about Telegram: there are two wallets there, and their key-ownership models are opposites — a custodial account and a self-custodial one, on the TON network. The second does have a recovery phrase, and it is imported like any non-custodial wallet. The impossibility applies only to the first.
What moving over the network costs can be seen from a rare documented example. A multi-chain wallet vendor described transferring assets and named a price: as of 19.09.2026 the help page gives a minimum of 0.3 GRAM on TON and a minimum of 15 TRX on TRON, with the caveat that the sum depends on the number of tokens and NFTs. The app's internal bonuses do not move across.
Fifteen TRX tallies with our own measurement: the first USDT transfer to an address that had not yet received the token cost 13.03 TRX on 19.09.2026 — right up against it. But 13.03 is the ceiling, the price when everything is burned: that is what 1.2% of the transfers in the measurement paid, while 46.6% paid nothing at all, because their energy was staked or delegated.
We are not giving dollar conversions for the TON network's coin (GRAM): as of 19.09.2026 the sources differ by 15%, and any such figure would be one we had picked rather than measured.
Five rules for the moment of the move
Rules for storing a recovery phrase are a subject of their own. Here is only what concerns the moment of the move itself.
- Enter the phrase only on the wallet's own recovery screen. No “migration services” and no “multi-importers”. The panic that follows an empty screen is their fuel.
- Do not move the phrase from a phone to a hardware wallet expecting it to become safe. An exposed phrase does not become safe: you need a new key generated on the device and a transfer over the network. This is an argument of ours, not the hardware makers' position — we found no such wording from them. What hardware actually gives you: a breakdown of the hardware wallet.
- Do not store both phrases together. After the move the old one remains a working key to the old address, and something may still arrive there.
- Do not delete the old wallet from the app before you have checked the new one. On the blockchain deleting changes nothing, but it takes away convenient access exactly when you will need it.
- Do not send everything in one transfer to an unverified address. A mistake in the address is irreversible: there is nothing that can undo such a transfer.
A move does not always end in another wallet. If the next step is an exchange, we have a separate direction for USDT on the TRON network: the address is issued with the network stated explicitly, and it is an ordinary transfer over the network.
Short answers
Will the address change if I enter the phrase in a different wallet?
No. The address is computed from the phrase, not from the app: with the same key derivation path it will stay the same. A different address means a different path — or the TON network, which has a derivation standard of its own.
How much does moving a wallet with the recovery phrase cost?
Nothing: there is no transaction and nothing happens on the blockchain. Only moving over the network costs money — as of 19.09.2026 a multi-chain wallet vendor gives a minimum of 0.3 GRAM on TON and 15 TRX on TRON, and the sum depends on the number of tokens and NFTs.
I entered the phrase and I see zero. Has the money been stolen?
First check the old address in an explorer — the one people sent the money to. If the coins are on it, the trouble is in the app: the key derivation path, a second account, an account set up with a private key, a token or a network that has not been added, the TON standard. Separately, the passphrase, if one was set. If it is empty, the explorer will show where the last transfer went.
Do I need to send the coins if I am just changing phone?
No, it is enough to enter the recovery phrase into the app on the new phone. A transfer over the network is needed in two cases: someone else may have seen the phrase, or the money is on a custodial account where you do not have the key.
