How to Restore a MyMonero Seed (13 or 25 Words) After the Shutdown

You can still restore a MyMonero seed, and your money is not stuck. Your Monero lives on the Monero network, and your recovery phrase is the key that opens it in any wallet that understands that type of phrase. If you have 25 words, you can restore them today in MonkStash, Cake Wallet or Feather. If you have 13 words, the older MyMonero format, MonkStash restores those too, right in your browser. Either way, be extra careful about where you type them.

What happened to MyMonero

MyMonero was a popular web wallet that relied on its own servers to find your payments and show your balance. In October 2025 it announced that it would sunset its wallet service. According to the announcement, which Cake Wallet republished on its blog, the service would go offline on Tuesday 6 January 2026, and MyMonero would permanently destroy its data by 6 February 2026. The announcement also named Cake Wallet as the project's stewardship partner and its migration path. You can read it at the Cake Wallet announcement.

The key point is what the shutdown did and did not change. After that date you could no longer use MyMonero's servers to view a balance or send a transaction. Your funds did not move or disappear, because they were never stored on those servers. The announcement itself says that your seed phrase will always work with any Monero wallet. MyMonero's website now says the service has closed and points to Cake Wallet's guide for restoring from a seed phrase.

If you want the wider picture of the choices you have now, our guide to a MyMonero alternative compares them.

Which phrase do you have?

Before you open any wallet, count the words on your paper or in your password manager. The number tells you where you can restore.

The Monero project documents the three Monero phrase types in its mnemonics reference: legacy (25 words), MyMonero (13 words) and Polyseed (16 words). The 13th word of a MyMonero phrase is a checksum, which is how a wallet notices a typo.

If you are still unsure what a seed phrase is, start with our explainer on the Monero seed phrase.

Restore your phrase with MonkStash

MonkStash restores both MyMonero phrase types: the standard 25 words and the older 13 words. Your words are used on your own device to rebuild the wallet, and they are never sent to a server. Here is the whole restore, step by step:

1. Open MonkStash from a bookmark you made yourself, or type the address straight into your browser. Go to the wallet.
2. Choose Restore from recovery words.
3. Type your 25 words, or your 13 MyMonero words, in order. The last word is a checksum, so a typo is usually caught right away.
4. Enter roughly when you first used MyMonero, if you know it (more on this below). It is optional, but it saves a lot of waiting.
5. Set a new password. It locks the wallet on this device only. It is not part of your phrase.
6. Wait while the wallet scans the network. Your balance and history appear as it finishes.
7. Compare the main address with the one you remember from MyMonero. If it matches, you are done.

You can run the address through our Monero address validator to confirm that it is well formed. For a longer walkthrough, including what to do if the balance looks low, see how to restore a Monero wallet.

Restore height in plain words

Monero hides the details of payments, so a wallet cannot simply look up your balance. It has to scan the network block by block to find the payments that belong to you. The restore height is just the block where you tell it to start. A wallet that starts at the beginning of Monero's history will find everything but take a long time. A wallet that starts too late may miss older payments and show a balance that is too low.

• If you remember roughly when you first used MyMonero, pick a date a month or two earlier. That is safe and fast.
• If you do not remember, start from the beginning and be patient.
• If the balance looks low afterwards, restore again with an earlier date before you assume anything is missing.

Cake Wallet's own MyMonero guide gives the same advice: pick a date close to when you started using MyMonero so syncing stays fast without missing transactions.

If you have 13 words

Good news: MonkStash restores 13-word MyMonero phrases. Many wallets cannot, so here is why the format is different, how we handle it, and what to check.

Why 13 words is different

According to the Monero documentation, the MyMonero scheme is the 13-word version of the legacy scheme: the first 12 words carry the seed and the 13th is a checksum. The seed is shorter, so the private keys are worked out from it in a different way. That is why a wallet that only knows the standard 25-word format rejects it, or worse, would build a different wallet from the same words.

How MonkStash restores it

• In your browser, nowhere else. The words are decoded and turned into keys on your device, using the same steps MyMonero used. Nothing is uploaded.
• Tested against MyMonero's own results. We checked our conversion against three published MyMonero phrases whose keys and addresses were produced by MyMonero (the moneroexamples test cases). Every key and address matches.
• A built-in safety check. The wallet engine refuses to open a wallet if the address does not belong to the keys, so a mistake cannot quietly give you the wrong wallet.
• Typos are caught. The 13th word is a checksum. If a word is misspelled or out of order, you get a clear message instead of an empty wallet.

Other wallets

• Cake Wallet. MyMonero names Cake Wallet as its successor. Cake's MyMonero guide covers 25-word phrases only. Cake's app store listing says it supports restoring from a MyMonero 13-word seed, but one user on Cake's forum reported that a 13-word phrase would not restore. Those two statements disagree, so treat 13-word support in Cake as unconfirmed until you have tried it yourself. Our Cake Wallet review covers the rest of the app.
• Feather Wallet. Feather's seed documentation says it restores Polyseeds (16 words) and 14-word and 25-word seeds. It does not list the 13-word MyMonero format. More in our Feather wallet review.
• Official Monero wallets. The Monero documentation lists the 13-word type but does not say which wallets read it. The official software is built around the 25-word format.

You do not need a converter

You may see offline tools that turn a MyMonero phrase into a 25-word one. With a wallet that reads 13 words directly, you can skip that step entirely, along with its risks.

Where to restore your phrase today

This table reflects public documentation at the time of writing. Wallets change, so check the project's current guide before you commit a large balance. Our Monero wallets guide covers the other options.

Avoid the clone sites

When a well-known wallet shuts down, scammers go where its users are going: search results. A person typing "restore MyMonero wallet" into a search box is looking for exactly one thing, and a convincing look-alike page that asks for the words is the cheapest way to take it. Fake wallet sites and apps that steal keys are not new: a researcher documented a fake Android app that copied MyMonero's look and sent the keys typed into it to an attacker's database (see SerHack's write-up).

Follow these rules every time:

1. Never type your words into a site you reached from an ad, a message, a post or an email. Search ads can be paid for by anyone.
2. Use a bookmark. Get to the wallet once from an official source, check the address carefully, then bookmark it and use only the bookmark.
3. Read the domain, letter by letter. Extra words, swapped letters and odd endings are the classic tricks.
4. Be suspicious of anything asking you to "verify" or "sync" your wallet. A real wallet restores from your words once, locally, and never needs them again.
5. Ignore offers of help in comments and direct messages. Nobody legitimate will ask for your words.

For a full routine you can run in 60 seconds, read how to spot a fake Monero wallet. If you already entered your words on a site you are unsure about, treat them as compromised and move your funds to a new wallet right away. That page shows how.

After your balance appears

• Write the words down again, on paper, and store them somewhere safe. See how to back up a Monero wallet.
• Consider a fresh wallet. If your old phrase lived in a password manager, an email draft or a photo, sending your funds to a brand-new wallet with new words closes that door. It costs only a small network fee.
• Keep the old phrase out of sight. Once the funds have moved, the old phrase can be destroyed.

What to do next

Count your words, restore in a wallet you reached yourself, and compare the address. If you are new to Monero after MyMonero, how to use Monero is a good next read. When you are ready, open a wallet. If something does not match, ask us through support and never share your words while you do.