Recover Account from PolkadotJS

The default behavior on Polkadot Vault and PolkadotJS Apps is a little different. This tutorial will walk you through recovering an account on Polkadot Vault from PolkadotJS Apps.

• Notice: The UI may be variant for different versions, but the functionalities are the same in v4 version.

Get the mnemonic phrase and path

When creating an account on PolkadotJS, it will give you a mnemonic phrase on the beginning without any key derivation. You can change it if you click Advanced creation options button, here you can specify any path you like, leave it as an empty string if you do not want changes.

Recover identity with mnemonic phrase

On Polkadot Vault, each mnemonic phrase represents an identity, every account starts with an identity, and identity could derive infinite accounts from it. So firstly let's recover the identity from the mnemonic phrase.

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After tapping one network from the list, you will have the default account created for this network with a default path (as on the above image, //polkadot), but this one is different from the one created from Polkadot.js Apps, because the paths are different.

create the account by path

On Polkadot Vault, accounts are grouped by different networks, and the accounts generated by the default way are always prefixed with the network name. For example, //polkadot//fund or //polkadot//staking. So to recover an account with an arbitrary path, we need tap Add Network Account -> Create Custom Path.

Here We can input the path from PolkadotJS Apps, if you do not have a specific path, then just leave it empty. And then after we choose the network, we will have the same account as we created from PolkadotJS Apps.