Start here: coins live on the chain, the phone only holds the key

Get the worst case straight first: when a phone goes missing, the coins don't go with it. Coins are recorded on the chain, and what the wallet app on the phone holds is the key that can move them — the seed phrase or the private key. An MPC wallet like Binance Wallet keeps a shard of that key on the device. The thing you actually have to carry over to a new phone is that key.

Whether the new phone can restore anything depends only on what you still have: a seed phrase or private key, or a backup the wallet itself made — a cloud backup or a QR backup, both of which need a recovery password, or Binance Wallet's Quick Backup, which relies on verifying that you are you. An old phone that still opens is one extra way out, because it gives you a chance to make the backup you never made. With none of these, the wallet can't be restored, and anyone charging a fee to “get it back for you” is running a scam.

So the sections below aren't sorted by wallet brand. They're sorted by what is still in your hands.

What you still have Which section Outcome
The old phone still opens the wallet Situation one Make the backup first, then migrate; little can go wrong
The phone is gone, the seed phrase or private key is not Situation two Restorable, and not one word may be off
No seed phrase, but a backup the wallet made (cloud backup, QR backup or Quick Backup) Situation three Follow that wallet's restore flow
Phone and seed phrase both gone, and no wallet backup was ever made (or the backup needs a password you've forgotten) Situation four Not restorable; this is the end of the road
Think this through before you switch

For a seed-phrase wallet, importing it on a new phone isn't “moving” the wallet, it's cutting a second key. Trust Wallet's help pages state that the same wallet can be restored on several devices, and whoever holds the seed phrase can move the coins. The copy on the old phone is not cancelled automatically, so whoever ends up with that old phone may end up holding a key.

One boundary: this piece is only about self-custody wallets. Moving an exchange login or a 2FA app such as Google Authenticator is a different job, and it sits in Binance Account Security · Seven Layers Every Beginner Should Set.

Situation one: the old phone still opens the wallet

This is the easiest case, and the one most often wasted. The usual sequence error: the new phone arrives, the old one is factory-reset and traded in the same afternoon, and only afterwards does it turn out the seed phrase was never written down. As long as the old phone still opens the wallet, leave it alone for now.

On the old phone, find the place in the wallet that shows the seed phrase or exports the private key. It is usually somewhere under settings or security, and it will ask for your wallet password first. Every wallet names it differently, so that wallet's own help pages decide.

The steps:

  1. Copy the seed phrase onto paper by hand, in order, then check it word by word once it's written. No screenshots, no photos, nothing in a notes app, and don't send it to yourself over chat or email. Trust Wallet's backup guide makes the same point: email, cloud storage and photo libraries can all be breached, and offline physical storage is safer.
  2. If the wallet holds accounts you imported with a separate private key, write those keys down separately as well; if a hardware wallet is connected, confirm that the hardware wallet's own backup still exists. MetaMask's restore article spells this out: before you go any further, back up your seed phrase and every private key, whether from a hardware wallet or an imported account.
  3. Install the wallet on the new phone. Take it from the official site or the app store, and check the developer name before installing. Counterfeit wallets have appeared in the stores: see Fake Trust Wallet on the App Store: Drained Minutes After Import, and the way to tell them apart — developer name, download count, whether it asks for your seed phrase — is set out in How Can I Identify a Fake Crypto Wallet App?, which applies to wallet apps just as well.
  4. In the official app on the new phone, choose to import an existing wallet, and type the words from the paper one at a time.
  5. Put the two phones side by side and compare the receiving addresses. Only move on once they match; the checking method is in the last section.

Binance Wallet works on a different principle: it has no seed phrase, so while the old phone still opens, what you confirm is that the backup still works. The Binance Wallet FAQ is clear about this: if you've forgotten the recovery password but can still access the wallet, back it up again immediately, because once you can no longer access it, backing up is no longer possible. An old phone that still lights up is exactly that window. Once the backup checks out, restore on the new phone through the entry point described in situation three.

Stuck at the password step: you can't remember the wallet password that unlocks the seed phrase. Don't keep guessing at random; start with What If I Forget My Wallet Password (Not the Seed)?. If the seed phrase is in your hands, a forgotten password isn't a disaster. But if the phrase was never written down, the old phone is the only key you have, so don't reset it before the password comes back to you.

Situation two: the old phone is lost or dead, but the seed phrase survives

Phone lost, dropped, stolen — if that sheet of paper with the seed phrase is still there, the wallet can be restored. Trust Wallet's help pages put it bluntly: when a device is lost, stolen or reset, the recovery phrase is the only way to restore the wallet.

Install the official app on the new phone (again, check the developer name), and during first-time setup choose the option for importing an existing wallet. Two examples checked against the official instructions:

  • Trust Wallet: open the app, choose “I already have a wallet”, then “Secret Phrase”, and enter the words. If you saved a private key separately at the time, you can import with that instead.
  • MetaMask: when setting up on the new device, choose to restore with the Secret Recovery Phrase. Afterwards you set a new password, and the networks and tokens you need have to be added again.

Other wallets follow the same logic: import with the seed phrase, and take the menu names from that wallet's own help pages.

What matters most while typing is accuracy. One wrong word, or the right words in the wrong order, and what you restore is a completely different wallet. So if the balance comes up as zero or the address looks unfamiliar, the first response should be to go back to the paper and check the words, not to conclude the coins are gone.

Restored but the coins aren't showing, four things to check:

  • The address isn't the one you remember: most likely a word or the order is off; go back to the paper and check them one by one.
  • The address is right, but accounts are missing: when MetaMask restores, it checks accounts in order and adds back the ones with a non-zero ETH balance on Ethereum mainnet, stopping at the first account whose ETH balance is zero. Later accounts have to be added manually until you reach the one you want, and accounts you imported with a private key or a different seed phrase have to be imported again by hand.
  • The address is right and the accounts are there, but one token doesn't show: check whether that token's network has been added and whether the token needs adding manually. After a MetaMask restore from the seed phrase, networks and tokens have to be added again, and Trust Wallet's guide also notes that some tokens have to be added by hand.
  • You imported into a different wallet app and the balance is blank: that usually comes down to differences between wallets, which has its own page: Can I Use One Mnemonic Phrase Across Different Wallets?

MetaMask has one more trap: if the new phone already has MetaMask installed with other accounts in it, the official advice is to import the new seed phrase rather than reset the whole wallet. A reset clears every account on that device.

When to stop: if you've checked the words several times and the address still doesn't match, stop there. Don't go searching for a “seed phrase repair tool”, and don't type the words into any web page. The moment they go into a web page, you've handed the key over.

My own judgement, not an official requirement

If the phone was lost or stolen rather than simply broken, I'd prepare as though the key may have leaked: no lock screen, no wallet password, or any suspicion that someone has seen the paper with the seed phrase, and after restoring on the new phone I'd generate a fresh wallet, write down the new seed phrase by hand, move the assets across and treat the old wallet as abandoned. It costs a little in fees, and what you get back is not having to bet on whose hands that phone ended up in. For the full emergency sequence, compare Private Key Leak Response: The First 24 Hours.

Situation three: no seed phrase, but a backup the wallet made (Binance Wallet as the example)

Never written down a seed phrase? Don't panic yet. If you use Binance Wallet, that's normal — it doesn't support seed phrases in the first place.

Binance Wallet is the self-custody wallet inside the Binance app, built on MPC: it generates three key shards, kept in places that include your cloud storage and your device, with the cloud copy encrypted by a recovery password only you know. Accessing the wallet takes at least two of those shards. Once the phone is gone, the shard on the device goes with it, and the route Binance describes is to restore from the backup you made earlier: a cloud backup or QR backup needs the recovery password, while Quick Backup goes through identity verification.

On the new phone the path is: log in to the Binance app, go to [Asset] > [Wallet] > [Restore Wallet], then pick the backup method you used. I'm taking those button names from the official English help pages; whatever your app's interface shows at the time overrides this.

The backup you made What restoring needs The process
Cloud backup The cloud account you connected + the recovery password Allow the Binance app to access your cloud storage, then enter the recovery password
QR code backup That backup QR code + the recovery password Scan the code, then enter the recovery password
Quick Backup You in person, through MFA verification and a liveness check No recovery password needed, but the account's KYC details have to match you

One more thing worth knowing: the Binance app currently supports login on a single device only, so Binance Wallet can't be used on several devices at once. Don't plan on running the old and the new phone side by side.

When the restore doesn't go through:

  • You can't get into the cloud account: go through the cloud provider's own account recovery first, get the account back, and then return to the Binance app to restore.
  • You've forgotten the recovery password, but Binance Wallet still opens on the old phone: while you still have access, back it up again immediately (see situation one). You set that recovery password yourself and Binance doesn't store it, so if you forget it Binance can't retrieve it for you.
  • You've forgotten the recovery password and the old device is unusable or the Binance app has been deleted: according to the official FAQ, at that point Binance Wallet can't be accessed and Binance can't restore it for you either. That is situation four. Quick Backup is the exception: restoring from it doesn't need the recovery password, and it follows the identity check in the table above.

If you'd rather not leave everything resting on the cloud, Binance Wallet offers a conversion to a private-key wallet: find the option in the wallet management page, complete identity verification, and back up the private keys before leaving the page. What you get afterwards is one private key per network, which the official page lets you view network by network, with a “copy all” option too. My suggestion is to write them down one by one and not use “copy all”, which puts private keys on the clipboard on the way to somewhere else. Lose a phone after that and you're close to situation two. Whether it's worth doing depends on your own threat model: one more private key is also one more thing to keep hidden.

MetaMask has a comparable cloud route: its restore article says you can sign in on a new device with a Google or Apple account plus a password, in which case restoring doesn't require resetting the password and networks and tokens are imported automatically. That path requires the wallet to have been linked to a Google or Apple account earlier; the article doesn't expand on it, so MetaMask's help pages are the authority here. Whether keeping wallet data in the cloud is a sound idea at all is worth reading first: Should I Back Up My Crypto Wallet to iCloud?

Situation four: phone gone, no seed phrase, no wallet backup — stop here

The phone is gone, the seed phrase and private keys were never written down, and no wallet backup of any kind was ever made — or the backup that exists needs a recovery password you simply cannot recall. This line doesn't come with a detour: the wallet can't be restored.

Self-custody means nobody is holding the key on your behalf. Trust Wallet states that it doesn't store and cannot access your seed phrase or private keys, and that there is no reset option once they're lost; Binance likewise states that with a self-custody wallet, protecting the assets and the backup is the user's own responsibility. What the wallet makers can't do, a third party certainly can't.

Stop here, and don't do any of this:

  • Don't pay anyone for an “asset recovery” or “wallet repair” service; the playbook is in ChainGuard 'Forensics' Scam: How Recovery Services Steal Twice.
  • Don't hand whatever information you have left to anyone claiming to be support. Trust Wallet warns specifically that scammers pose as support to ask for the recovery phrase, and some claim they can “unlock” a view-only wallet for a fee, which is the same scam.
  • Don't download so-called recovery software from search results.

Only two things are still worth doing. One is to search again through the places you might once have copied the phrase to: an old notebook, the pouch where you keep ID documents, the drawer where important papers live. The other is to confirm the old phone is genuinely dead — if it's only a cracked screen and it can be repaired and powered on, you're back in situation one, and if you send it in for repair with the wallet still on it, pick a repair channel you trust. As for looking up the old address on a block explorer: seeing a balance there only proves the coins are still on the chain, not that you can still move them.

Restored isn't finished: address, small amount, old phone, in that order

Seeing a balance on the new phone doesn't mean the migration is done.

Compare the address character by character. Take the receiving address in the new wallet and hold it against the one shown on the old phone, or against an address you saved in an old withdrawal record, and check it from the first character to the last rather than glancing at the two ends. If it doesn't match, stop and go back to whichever situation applies.

Then a small amount. My habit is to send one small transfer: a matching address says the wallet you restored is the same one, and being able to sign and broadcast is what proves this phone can actually move the money. Send a small amount from the new wallet to another address of your own, watch it confirm on a block explorer, and only then move anything large. An on-chain transfer has no undo button, and the fee is what buys the certainty.

Deal with the old phone only after that.

  • Selling it, giving it away or recycling it: remove the wallet inside the app and uninstall the app first, then factory-reset the phone. As long as that data is still on the old device, there is one more key out there.
  • Keeping it as a spare: it is still a key. The lock screen and the wallet password both stay set, and it lives somewhere other people can't reach.
  • If you use Binance Wallet: the app supports a single device only, so the new phone is the one that counts, and the app on the old one should go.

Only at that point is the migration complete. When you deal with the old phone depends on whether that small transfer has landed, not on the day the new phone arrived.

Common questions

After importing the wallet on a new phone, can the old phone still be used?

It depends on the wallet type. Importing a seed-phrase wallet onto a new phone does not invalidate the copy on the old one; two devices then hold the same key, so if you're finished with the old phone, remove the wallet first and then reset it. Binance Wallet is different: the Binance app currently supports login on a single device only, so Binance Wallet can't be used on several devices at once.

My phone is lost. Are the coins in the wallet still there?

The coins are on the chain, not on the phone, so losing the phone doesn't make them disappear. Whether you can take back control depends on whether you have the seed phrase or private key, or a backup the wallet made (a cloud backup or QR backup with the recovery password, or Binance Wallet's Quick Backup). If you're worried that the seed phrase or the old phone has ended up in someone else's hands, what I do after restoring is move the assets into a freshly generated wallet.

Can I screenshot the seed phrase and send it to the new phone?

Don't. A screenshot goes into the photo library, the cloud photo library and the chat history, all of which can be browsed by someone else or breached; on the page that displays the phrase, Trust Wallet blocks screenshots and screen recording outright. Copy the phrase onto paper by hand and type it word by word into the official app on the new phone, and never into a web page.

Binance Wallet has no seed phrase, so how do I restore it on a new phone?

Log in to the Binance app on the new phone, go to [Asset] > [Wallet] > [Restore Wallet], and choose the backup method you used: a cloud backup means allowing the app to access your cloud storage and entering the recovery password, a QR backup means scanning the code and entering the recovery password, and Quick Backup goes through MFA verification and a liveness check. Binance doesn't store the recovery password, so if you forget it, Binance can't find it for you.

Is it the same for TokenPocket or imToken when switching phones?

The logic is the same: import with the seed phrase into the official app on the new phone. I haven't checked those two wallets' menu names and cloud backup details item by item, so check each one's own help pages.

Someone says they can recover an un-backed-up wallet for a fee. Is that credible?

No. Trust Wallet states that if the recovery phrase is lost it cannot help; Binance states that if you've forgotten the recovery password and can't access the device, it can't restore the wallet either. If the wallet makers can't do it, a third party certainly can't. Paid recovery, people posing as support to ask for a seed phrase, and claims of unlocking a view-only wallet are all common scams.

Sources

The pages below were checked in September 2026. Wallet menus and restore options change from version to version, so before you act, trust whatever the page says at that moment over this list.