Device broken, phrase intact
Not a recovery problem at all. Buy a compatible wallet and restore from the phrase. Your funds live on the blockchain, not in the device.
Straightforward
A hardware wallet holds keys in a secure element built specifically to resist extraction — including by a laboratory. That is the product working as intended, and it means the recovery phrase is not a backup of your wallet. It is your wallet.
Hardware wallets are designed to resist extraction and they do it well. What is actually recoverable is almost always a seed phrase, a wallet file or a keystore that lived on storage which has since failed.
The design principle, and the reason recovery works the way it does.
Your private keys are generated inside a secure element — a tamper-resistant chip similar to those in bank cards and passports — and they are designed never to leave it. When you approve a transaction, the device signs it internally and outputs only the signature. The key itself is never transmitted to the computer, which is the entire point of the product.
Those chips are engineered against exactly the techniques a recovery laboratory would use: physical probing, side-channel analysis, fault injection, decapsulation. They include active meshes, sensors that wipe on tampering, and encrypted internal buses. This is not incidental protection — it is the specification, and it is independently certified against it.
So a firm offering to extract keys from a secure element is offering something the device is specifically built to prevent. Be extremely careful with anyone making that claim about a wallet holding real value.
And what those words really are.
The recovery phrase is not a password and it is not a hint. Under BIP-39 it is a human-readable encoding of the entropy your wallet was generated from — each word maps to a defined index in a standard 2048-word list, and together with an optional passphrase it deterministically regenerates every key the wallet has ever held or will hold.
Which produces two consequences worth understanding. Anyone with those words has your funds, regardless of where the physical device is. And with those words the device is entirely replaceable — a new wallet from any compatible manufacturer restores the same accounts.
It also means the phrase must never be typed into a computer, photographed, stored in a password manager or emailed to yourself. The whole security model assumes it exists only offline.
Stated plainly, because this is an area with a great deal of misleading marketing.
Not a recovery problem at all. Buy a compatible wallet and restore from the phrase. Your funds live on the blockchain, not in the device.
Water, fire, faded ink, a partially torn sheet. Physically reading damaged paper is genuine work, and BIP-39 has a checksum — so a small number of missing or uncertain words can sometimes be narrowed by validating candidates.
Software wallets rather than hardware. If the file is on a failed disk we recover the file, and if its password is weak or partly remembered we can attempt password recovery against it.
Not recoverable. Not by us and not by anyone — the chip is built to prevent exactly that, and no equipment changes it.
The distinction between our work and what a wallet manufacturer’s support would cover.
Where a drive, NAS or laptop holding wallet files, exchange records or an encrypted keystore has failed, that is ordinary recovery work and it is what we do — the storage is imaged read-only and the files extracted intact. Single drives from £300 +VAT, arrays from £500 +VAT, after a free 48-hour diagnostic.
Where an encrypted wallet file is recovered and the password is lost, we can run professional password recovery against it: GPU-accelerated, guided by whatever you can recall of the password. That succeeds on short, reused or partly-remembered passwords and fails against a long random one, and we will tell you which position you are likely in before you commit.
What we will not do is claim to extract keys from a hardware wallet’s secure element. If the seed phrase is genuinely gone and the keys only ever existed inside that chip, the honest answer is that the funds are unreachable — and you should treat any firm saying otherwise with considerable caution.
No. The keys live in a secure element engineered specifically to resist physical probing, side-channel analysis and fault injection — that is the product working as designed. Be very cautious of any firm claiming otherwise.
Not if you have the recovery phrase. Your funds live on the blockchain rather than in the device, so a compatible replacement wallet restores the same accounts from those words. The device is replaceable; the phrase is not.
A human-readable encoding of the entropy your wallet was generated from. Under BIP-39 each word maps to an index in a standard 2048-word list, and together they deterministically regenerate every key the wallet holds.
Sometimes. BIP-39 includes a checksum, so a small number of missing or uncertain words can occasionally be narrowed by validating candidates. A substantially incomplete phrase generally cannot.
Yes — that is ordinary recovery work. The storage is imaged read-only and the file extracted intact. If its password is also lost we can attempt password recovery, which works on weak or partly-remembered passwords.
No. The entire security model assumes it exists only offline. Never type it into a computer, photograph it, store it in a password manager or email it to yourself — anyone with those words has your funds.