Restoring your wallet from seed

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You can restore your wallet from seed to recover your funds in unusual circumstances when nothing else is working (e.g., if a data directory and its backups become corrupted).

Note that such a recovery only restores funds (BTC and BSQ) but does not restore any other Bisq data such as payment accounts, open disputes, etc. This data is stored in the Bisq data directory. Furthermore, restoring from seed does not restore reputation value earned from contributing to Bisq.

Restoring to a Bisq wallet

Before restoring from seed, please try restoring your wallet from a backup first.

To restore a wallet using seed words, go to Account > Wallet Seed, enter the seed words and date in the "Restore wallet from seed words" section, and then click Restore Wallets.

The date is not strictly required, but it makes the recovery process drastically quicker. Without a date, bitcoinj (the library Bisq uses to interact with the Bitcoin network) will resort to traversing the entire Bitcoin blockchain from 2013 (sometime around block 260,000) in order to rebuild your wallet state, and it will take a very long time. Specifying the date your wallet was created cuts recovery time significantly by telling bitcoinj where to start traversing the blockchain.

Bisq will then restart and start to rebuild your wallet state. If you see a zero balance for BTC and/or BSQ after restoring from seed, wait until the program is done syncing with the Bitcoin network. You'll know syncing is done when the green bar on the bottom right labeled "Synchronizing With Bitcoin Mainnet (using Tor) / Synchronizing DAO" goes away.

Go here to restore a Bisq wallet from seed.

Things to know:

  • You should only restore from seed into a new Bisq wallet.
  • If your goal is merely to transfer BTC or BSQ to another Bisq instance, it's best to simply send the funds to the new instance with a transaction.
  • You can restore BTC funds to an external wallet like Electrum, but restoring BSQ on a non-Bisq wallet is highly discouraged and not supported. The rules to form valid BSQ transactions are rather complex, and even the slightest error can result in invalid BSQ.

Restoring to a non-Bisq wallet

Bisq’s built-in bitcoin wallet is based on BIP-44. BTC segwit addresses have a m/44'/0'/1' derivation path and legacy addresses have a m/44'/0'/0' derivation path. BSQ wallets have a m/44'/142'/0' derivation path.

The same seed phrase is used for BTC and BSQ wallets.

Please do not try to send BSQ to a non-Bisq wallet, or to otherwise create your own BSQ transactions. The rules to form a valid BSQ transaction are rather complex, and even the slightest error can result in invalid BSQ. Bisq will NOT provide support for any such cases.

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