Recover by Derivation Path

When using the latest backup snapshot, which contains the information about all your vaults, the recovery tool will automatically recover all your vaults, and the recovery output file will be complete. This is why we recommend you always maintain the most up-to-date version of the backup snapshot.

However, even if, for some reason, you only have an older version of the backup snapshot, you can still recover the private keys of additional vaults that were created after this backup snapshot file had been generated. To do this, you will need to first determine the key type and the derivation path of the vault, and then provide them as inputs to the recovery tool.

Fordefi uses non-hardened BIP32 derivation for deriving the vault addresses from the master key. Each derivation path follows the pattern: m/44/<COIN_TYPE>/<ACCOUNT>/0/<INDEX>.

You can determine the necessary elements as follows:

• Key type — See the key type that Fordefi uses on each chain here.
• COIN_TYPE — Fordefi follows the SLIP-0044 standard for setting coin types. For example, we use 60 for EVM vaults and 501 for Solana.
• ACCOUNT is a running index, starting at 0, for all vaults using a particular key type.
• INDEX is 0 for all vaults except Bitcoin vaults. In Bitcoin vaults, it is a running index for all the vault addresses.

For vaults that appear in the recovery output file, you can see derivation paths in the Bip Path column.

Once you have determined the derivation path, run the recovery tool with the desired key type and derivation path as inputs.

For example to recover an EVM vault with account index 7, run

./recovery-tool key-share-recover \
   -p "</path/to/backup.json>" \
   --key-type ECDSA_SECP256K1 \
   --derivation-path m/44/60/7/0/0