SeedCrypt Recover — Command Reference

Install & build

SeedCrypt Recover is distributed as Rust source code only — there are no pre-built binaries. Install Rust (rustup) and build with Cargo. Same instructions are used on macOS, Linux, and Windows.

For air-gapped use, run cargo vendor on a connected machine, then transfer the directory and pass --offline on the air-gapped host.

Global options

Subcommands: missing · typo · reorder. All three accept --checkpoint <path>/--resume <path> for long searches — see Checkpoint & resume.

missing — Recover N missing words at known positions

Replace each unknown word with ? in the mnemonic. Up to 3 missing words are supported (2048⁴ = 17 billion combinations is impractical). The mnemonic must contain 12, 15, 18, 21, or 24 words total. Without --address, the tool returns the first BIP-39 checksum-valid candidate (cheap but ambiguous). With --address, every checksum-valid candidate is re-derived along all six standard derivation paths (BIP-44/49/84/86 for BTC-likes, m/44'/60' for ETH, m/44'/195' for TRX) and validated against your address. Add --allow-typo if you're not sure the missing word is the only thing wrong — see the combined example below.

Flags

Examples

typo — Fix a single-word typo

All words are present but one is wrong. The tool tries every position × all 2048 BIP-39 words — total ≈ N × 2048 candidates (25 k for a 12-word seed, 49 k for 24 words). This covers both a genuine misspelling (a word that isn't in the BIP-39 wordlist at all, e.g. abandun) and a valid-but-wrong word (e.g. apple instead of abandon) — at most one wrong word at a time; two unresolvable words are rejected. Always pair this with --address: without validation, the original (wrong) seed itself passes the checksum and you’d get a false positive.

Flags

Examples

reorder — Fix words that are correct but in the wrong order

Every word is correct, but you suspect a subset of positions got shuffled — e.g. you wrote them down out of order. --permute-positions takes 2–10 positions (1-indexed, comma-separated) and tries every permutation of just those positions, leaving everything else fixed. The search space is k! where k is the number of marked positions — a full 12-word permutation (12! ≈ 479 million) is impractical, but marking only the 2–5 positions you actually suspect keeps it to a handful of candidates.

Flags

Examples

Checkpoint & resume

All three subcommands accept --checkpoint <path> and --resume <path> (mutually exclusive) so a long search survives a crash, Ctrl+C, or reboot.

• Starting fresh with --checkpoint writes progress to <path> periodically (roughly every 100,000 candidates) as the search runs. The write is atomic (temp file + rename) — a crash mid-write never corrupts the checkpoint.
• Pressing Ctrl+C stops the search gracefully, prints a ready-to-paste --resume command (if --checkpoint was set — otherwise it just reports how many candidates were tested, since nothing was saved), and exits with code 130.
• --resume <path> loads the checkpoint and continues from its saved index. It refuses to proceed if the checkpoint's signature — mode, mnemonic pattern, address, passphrase, derivation range, --allow-typo state — doesn't exactly match this invocation's, so you can't accidentally resume into a different search.
• The checkpoint file never stores your passphrase or mnemonic in plaintext — both are stored as SHA-256 hashes, used only to verify a resume matches the original search.

Supported addresses (auto-detection)

Pass any of these to --address. The coin and derivation type are inferred from the prefix.

Match is case-insensitive for hex characters. EIP-55 mixed-case is preserved but not enforced. If the prefix isn’t recognized, the command fails fast with "Could not detect address type".

Exit codes & output

• 0 — Recovery succeeded. Prints the full mnemonic, total candidates tested, and elapsed time.
• 0 with "No match found" — Search space exhausted with no checksum-and-address match. Try widening --account-end / --address-end, or check the passphrase.
• 1 — Invalid input: malformed mnemonic, unknown address prefix, too many ? placeholders, a --resume checkpoint that doesn't match this invocation, etc.
• 130 — Interrupted (Ctrl+C) before completion. Standard "terminated by SIGINT" exit code. If --checkpoint was set, prints the exact --resume command to continue.

On success, the recovered seed is printed to stdout as a single line. The tool intentionally does NOT write the seed to disk — capture it manually if you need to persist it.

Practical tips

• Always pass --address when possible — without it, missing stops at the first checksum-valid candidate, which is rarely the right one.
• Try the default range first — most wallets use account 0, addresses 0–9 (HD wallets generate fresh receive addresses, so a used wallet typically has index 0 unused but earlier indexes match older receives).
• Use a freshly-booted air-gapped machine for highest-value recoveries. The binary doesn’t need internet at runtime.
• Test before trusting — pair --mnemonic with a known seed and known address first, to confirm the build works on your hardware.
• Don’t paste your real seed publicly — even when "just for testing". Use the BIP-39 test vector abandon × 11 + about instead, which derives the public ETH address 0x9858EfFD232B4033E47d90003D41EC34EcaEda94.
• Always pass --checkpoint for anything in the "hours or days" range — a 3-missing-word or wide-scan-range search can genuinely take that long, and an unattended machine will eventually reboot or lose power. See Checkpoint & resume.

Out of scope

• Password recovery (the BIP-39 --passphrase): the tool accepts a known passphrase but does not brute-force it.
• Non-secp256k1 chains: Solana (ed25519), Cardano (ed25519), Polkadot (sr25519), Cosmos, Stellar, Algorand. Those need separate tooling.
• Hardware-wallet-specific anti-tamper schemes (Trezor SLIP-39 sharding, Ledger Recover, etc.). SeedCrypt Recover only handles standard BIP-39 mnemonics.
• Cracking AES-256-GCM payloads from the SeedCrypt app — that’s the encryption product, not this recovery tool. AES-256-GCM is unbreakable; if you’ve lost the password, no offline tool will recover it.