Wallet Recovery with Bip39 Seed

Question

From having a list of bip39 seeds, is there any way of recovering a wallet? In particular, I have a list of ~100 seeds--one of which is mine--and need an automate way of figuring out which is valid and has my funds. Thanks

Answer 1

There are a few things to consider here.

First, do you know the path of the HD wallet? You can find out what type of path structure your wallet is using, and if the address with the unspent transactions was the very first one, then it would be account 0, for example.

See this on BIP44 paths...

If you know the path structure, and you know the exact address you are looking for at a given path, then you could do something like this using bitcoinjs-lib:

const bip39 = require("bip39")
const bitcoin = require("bitcoinjs-lib")

const network = bitcoin.networks.bitcoin

for (const phrase of phrases) {
    const seed = await bip39.mnemonicToSeed(phrase)
    const root = bitcoin.bip32.fromSeed(seed, network)
    const path = "m/44'/0'/0'/0"
    const child = root.derivePath(path)
    const { address } = bitcoin.payments.p2sh({
        redeem: bitcoin.payments.p2wpkh({
            pubkey: child.publicKey,
            network
        }),
        network
    })

    if (address === '3...') {
        //this is yours
    }
}

Note that this example is for P2WPKH wrapped addresses (3 prefix). You would need to change this a bit depending on the type of address you are trying to match.