This content is for educational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice or an inducement to buy, sell, or trade cryptoassets.
Restoring a wallet using a seed phrase is a common method to recover access to your assets across different blockchain addresses. However, with recent changes to Magic Eden Wallet’s heuristic for address detection, users may experience situations where an empty address doesn’t match when importing the same seed phrase.
This guide will help explain why this happens and what you need to be aware of when managing your addresses.
Why address mismatch happens with empty accounts
When restoring a wallet using your seed phrase, Magic Eden Wallet uses a heuristic to detect addresses based on two main factors:
Balance – An address that holds a balance will be prioritized and restored.
Transaction history – Previously, the wallet also used transaction history to detect addresses, even if they had zero balance.
However, from version 2.20, Magic Eden Wallet has shifted to balance-based detection as the primary method. This means that if you have an address with zero balance and no recent transactions, the wallet may not restore it in the same way it did previously.
What changed in the heuristic?
Now, the focus is on balance detection—this ensures a faster and more reliable process for detecting active wallet addresses. If you had an address with no balance but prior transactions, it might not show up in the restored wallet until a more robust detection system is in place.
This change can lead to differences between wallets restored on different devices. For example, if you restore your wallet on two devices, and an address has no balance, you may end up with different addresses for the same seed phrase.
How this affects your wallet
For users with zero balance addresses (e.g., for SOL or EVM accounts):
Different addresses: If an address has no balance, importing your seed phrase may generate a different address.
Transaction history: The current implementation doesn't always restore zero balance addresses, even if they had past transactions.
ENS or linked assets: For EVM-based addresses, if you have an ENS name or other assets linked to the address, always verify your address after restoring your wallet.
What can you do?
Double-check your addresses: After restoring your wallet, always verify the addresses for your digital assets (SOL, EVM, BTC, etc.). Ensure that the addresses match what you expect, especially before making any transactions.
Check for balance or history: For now, addresses with zero balances might not be restored as expected. If the address is linked to assets like an ENS or NFTs, make sure you manually check for its presence.
Back-up your addresses: It’s always a good practice to manually back up key addresses when you first set up your wallet. This can help avoid confusion if you need to restore your wallet later.
Use the same device: If possible, continue using the device where your wallet was initially set up to avoid address inconsistencies. The updated heuristic might treat your addresses differently across multiple devices.
Upcoming improvements
Magic Eden Wallet is working on improvements to address this issue. In the future, we plan to implement a hybrid system that checks both balance and transaction history to restore wallet addresses more accurately. Until then, we recommend users be cautious when restoring wallets and double-check any addresses with zero balances.
Always double-check your addresses when using a seed phrase, and if you have questions, feel free to reach out to our support team by clicking on the chat widget.