The story
A custody handover with no working wallet
The assets had not disappeared from the blockchain. Their address and balance could be checked. The unresolved question was whether anybody could produce the credentials needed to move them.
The original custody process had relied on a physical hardware wallet, encrypted recovery-phrase fragments, separate messages and several people retaining different pieces of information. When the client tried to recover the account, the hardware device was missing and the backup was incomplete.
The internal engineering team had already made a serious recovery attempt. It worked through the available material, reconstructed the missing part of the recovery phrase and tried to restore the wallet. A replacement hardware device did not show the address that held the assets.
That was the state of the case when Lionscraft received it: an incomplete backup, a recovery phrase that appeared to restore the wrong wallet, and months of unsuccessful work behind it.
Day one: reproduce the failure
Lionscraft started by independently checking the previous recovery work.
One of the twelve recovery words was unavailable because its encrypted source fragment could not be used. We developed a small program to reconstruct the missing word using the recovery phrase's standard structure.
The result matched the word the client's engineering team had already obtained.
We then restored the reconstructed recovery phrase on the replacement hardware wallet. The expected address still did not appear.
This established two useful facts. First, the earlier team had not simply overlooked the missing word: its reconstruction was consistent with ours. Second, recovering the phrase alone was not sufficient to locate the actual account.
By the end of the first working day, Lionscraft had reproduced the original failure and narrowed the investigation to how the recovered wallet was being opened.
Day two: find the account the wallet software was not showing
Cryptocurrency recovery phrases do not always correspond to a single address. Hierarchical deterministic wallets can derive many accounts from the same phrase, and the software must use the correct derivation settings to locate a particular account.
A recovery can therefore be technically successful while the expected assets remain invisible in the wallet interface.
Lionscraft examined the relationship between the recovered phrase, the client's known on-chain address and the account-derivation settings being used during restoration.
The missing piece was not another recovery word or a damaged blockchain record. It was the account path.
Using the appropriate derivation settings, we generated the account matching the client's known address and recovered the signing credentials necessary to control it.
The technical recovery took two working days. The client had been trying to solve the problem for months.
A live transfer confirmed the result
Finding the correct account was the technical breakthrough. The client still needed proof that the recovered wallet could actually move the assets.
Several days after the two-day investigation, Lionscraft worked with the client to initiate a small test transfer to an exchange account under the client's control.
The transfer succeeded.
The client then proceeded with additional transfers and reported converting recovered tokens into cash. The precise quantity and realised proceeds are confidential and are not used as marketing figures.
The result was an operational recovery, not just a restored wallet screen: the assets could be moved and used by their owner again.