Accessing Funds on Polkadot Wallet - with Lost Password

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Hello Polkadot community,

I need some help accessing my funds through my Polkadot wallet. I participated in the Moonbeam-Polkadot parachain auction—through the Crowdloan—however, now, I cannot access my locked DOT as I have lost my password for my Polkadot wallet.

After some digging, I found that it may be possible as per this link: Social Recovery · Polkadot Wiki I would like to know its feasibility, difficulty, and ultimately some help is executing this task.

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Whats a scam? Very fast to judge someone who is seeking legitimate help.

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@paulgarvey I’m sorry for your situation.

  • Social recovery is only available on Kusama.
  • It would only be available to use if you set up a social recovery situation BEFORE you lost the keys.
  • Technically, Polkadot’s governance could intervene and do some kind of fund recovery for you. There are some historical examples of this happening, like this.
  • However, this should be treated as something super-non-trivial, and with a default preference of voting NAY on any such proposals.
  • If you wanted to proceed with something like this you would, at a minimum:
    • Need to divulge enough private information about yourself and evidence that you owned that key, in some way which any stranger in Polkadot would believe you.
    • Know that everyone will assume by default you are trying to scam in some way.
    • Need to then present all the evidence and a open a governance proposal (which will require a very large DOT deposit, since it will likely require the ROOT track or similar).
    • Then let Polkadot governance vote on the result.

Obviously the fine details can play out differently here, but the overall idea will be the same.

Unfortunately this forum is specifically not for these kinds of support requests.

For that, I suggest you reach out through: https://support.polkadot.network/

They can’t actually do anything directly for you, but if you specifically wanted to go through the process above, perhaps they could help assist you with the details / steps.

After the holidays probably.

In most cases, this is likely to just be an important and costly lesson on the importance of securing your keys and backing them up properly. Know that you are not the first, and certainly not the last person to make this mistake.

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