Cake Wallet Web › Guides › Cake Wallet restore: recovering a wallet from a seed phrase

Cake Wallet restore: recovering a wallet from a seed phrase

A Cake Wallet backup is its recovery phrase. Restoring means feeding that phrase back into the wallet so the same keys, addresses and balances reappear. Here is the whole path, the three supported formats and the usual reasons a restore fails.

Know which phrase you have

16 words — Polyseed, the default for modern Cake Wallet installs.
12 or 24 words — BIP39, used by many multi-coin wallets and hardware devices.
25 words — classic Monero seed; the 25th word is a checksum, not entropy.

Count the words before you start: picking the wrong length is the most common reason a valid phrase looks “invalid”.

Restoring in the browser

Open the dashboard and choose Restore wallet from seed.
Select the phrase length and type the words in order. Pasting the whole phrase at once usually works as well.
Confirm. The wallet validates the checksum, derives the keys and starts a sync.
Compare the first receive address with the one you recorded from the old wallet — they must match exactly.

When the address does not match

Wrong format selected — a 25-word Monero phrase entered as BIP39 produces a different wallet or an error. Switch the length and retry.
BIP39 passphrase — if the original wallet used an extra passphrase, it must be supplied too; without it you get a valid but different set of addresses.
Typo — a single wrong word changes everything. Compare against the written copy.
Missing words — phrases are restored complete, in order.

Restore height and sync time

A wallet with history takes longer to appear than an empty one, because the interface scans the chain for the addresses derived from the phrase. If a balance shows up as zero on a wallet you know was funded, let the sync finish before concluding anything.

Restoring never moves funds and never requires sending anything first. Any page that asks you to “activate” or “validate” a wallet by making a transfer is a scam.

Questions

Can I restore a 25-word Monero seed in the web wallet?

Yes — select the 25-word option and enter the words in order; the addresses will match the original wallet.

Why does my restored wallet show a different address?

Usually the wrong phrase format or a typo. A BIP39 passphrase also changes the derived addresses.

Does a restore cost anything?

No. Restoring is local key derivation; only normal network fees apply when you send later.

Open the Cake Wallet dashboard All guides