Retrieving your Counterparty Assets Stored on a Hardware Device with only the Seed Phrase
Through lots of trial and error and discussions with other curious minds, a method of retrieving Counterparty assets stored on a hardware wallet has been crafted. Yes it’s labor intensive, prone to error, and all around clunky, but it’s the best we have at this moment in time. The use case of this process is for when all you have is your seed phrase (meaning your hardware device was damaged, lost, stolen, etc.)
Our conclusion after working through this problem is that it is not as simple as holding a pass phrase. Especially in the case of the primary user’s timely or untimely passing.
Your friend or loved one is going to need an instruction manual to go along with the seed phrase in order to retrieve what you have safely stored for them.
For this process we used a Trezor Safe 3 hardware device and the Electrum desktop Bitcoin wallet software version 4.4.6.
From Electrum click on “File” and then “New/Restore”.
Choose “Standard wallet” and then click “Next”.
Give your new wallet a name and click “Next”.
Choose “I already have a seed” and click “Next”.
Here’s where it gets a bit tricky. Before entering your hardware device’s seed phrase, you first need to click on “Options”. Choose “BIP 39 seed” and click “OK”. After doing this you will see a warning regarding BIP 39 seeds displayed. This is a bit concerning since the Electrum wallet is stating that they may not always support it.
A little background on the BIP 39 standard and Electrum’s stance on it. Electrum was created 2 years prior to the BIP 39 standard being implemented so there are now 2 lists of words in play when importing your seed phrase. The “old” words are highlighted in yellow. Assuming your seed phrase was created in the last 8–10 years you want to avoid those yellow words. Electrum seems to be alone in the fight against BIP 39 so hopefully if their software does not support it in the future, you will be able to find one that does.
Begin to type in each of your 12 or 24 words the makeup the hardware wallet’s seed phrase. When you are done, click “Next”.
You can then chose to give the Electrum wallet a password and to encrypt the wallet file. Click “Next” after deciding.
If everything went right, you should be able to click on the Addresses tab and see wallet addresses that you recognize or if you are not the original creator of the wallets, at least see addresses with a Bitcoin balance and/or transactions (Tx).
Right click on an address with a balance or transactions and then choose “Private key”.
Click the blue “copy” icon to copy the Private key and click “Close”.
You now have the private key to a wallet that should contain your Counterparty tokens. Open FreeWallet or another Counterparty enabled wallet and import this private key in order to view, transfer, sell the tokens at will.
This article will be updated as new information becomes available.
