Bitcoin Forum

I had a Ledger, but now I lost it. And I don't have recovery phrase.
However, I have the backup file of Electrum. I can still open it, but I can't send coin.
Can't I recover it?

Unfortunately all gone I am afraid.
You either need the ledger or the seed. If you had the seed, then you could buy a new one and recover the wallet. Your seed was everything you had.

One thing about hardware wallet like Ledger, even reputed hardware wallets, the seed phrase is stored on the device, like on ledger it is stored in the ledger hardware secure element. Transaction can be made while connecting your hardware wallet to your Electrum wallet, but know that seed phrase is never connected, it remains and stored on ledger.

The best you can do now is to get you seed phrase if possible you can still have access to it, but if you do not have access to it or the master private key or the private keys that controls the addresses the coins are stored, then your coin is gone forever.

Make proper backup of your seed phrase (and passphrase if included), its all you need to have access to your bitcoin from anywhere you are in the world.

You didn't even need to buy a New ledger. You could just insert the seed phrase into a new electrum wallet and spend your coins.

Ledger manufacturer  is very clear about the importance of the recovery phrase. It is a great irresponsibility to have a ledger device without the recovery phrase back up..

There is nothing you can do now, as Royse777 said.

How did you manage to lose the device and backup (seed words)? I can even understand that you were carrying the device with you and that it fell out somewhere, but why and how did you allow yourself to not have the backup that is an integral part of the initialization of the device?

If you do not trust us for some reason, your case is described on the official website of the manufacturer (https://www.ledger.com/blog/how-to-protect-your-seed-phrase).

I totally agree to this, but not safe enough like offline wallets while not bad for low amount of coin but because some people see it not to be safe like offline wallets, they do not go for it. There are cases some people, especially having very large amount of bitcoin, such people may not want to use online wallet for seed phrase importation, some people will prefer to have one extra hardware wallet in case if such happen, while some will not bother to wait for another hardware wallet to arrive for the seed phrase importation offline, which is also possible to run Electrum on an airgapped device.

The Electrum wallet file that you have is essentially useless. It's only function is to give you a portfolio-like overview of your bitcoins when your hardware wallet is not connected, or allow you to send/receive coins by using the Electrum interface when it is connected. The wallet file contains no private keys so there is no way to sign your transactions.

Your only two options are:

• Find your hardware device, enter the correct PIN, and move your coins to another wallet while you generate a new seed on your Nano device.
• Find your seed and restore it in another hardware wallet or software wallet. The latter decreases the security of your seed.

 

Chances aren't with your side.

How many incidents like this one do you (plural) need to understand the importance of the seed phrase? This is your money. You can't have really forgotten or chosen not to write it down. Ledger must have warned you about that.

Does it say that it's a watch-only wallet?

He must have made a copy of the words somewhere because to complete the Ledger onboarding process, you need to enter some of the words for your own security and "proof" that you have written them down. OP had to go through that step like anyone else.

I guess it's a normal wallet created by connecting a Ledger hardware wallet to Electrum. He can't send anything from it because it needs the device to sign the transactions with the corresponding private keys. And he doesn't have it anymore.

When I bought the ledger Nano there were three sheets to write the seed phrase. So I think you have received it as well. If you wrote your seed phrase to these three sheets then try to remember where are you keep them, there is no way to recover your fund if you lost your device and seed phrase together. Think deeply if somewhere you wrote seed phrase.

Just to inform you no one can help you without your seed and device if someone asks you to help through pm just ignore them, they might ask for fund and wallet credentials, so do not being a scam.