All transactions on Electrum Desktop are not being restored (not bip39 compatible?)

[Perlover]

I have an issue with the Green Wallet for Android (v4.1.5). The problem is as follows: at some point, the wallet apparently started generating Bitcoin addresses not according to BIP32 and BIP39 but using some internal scheme. When I tried to restore it in Electrum, only part of the transactions were recovered, while the rest became completely invisible.

Upon investigating, I discovered that around March 2025, the wallet started sending change to some other Bech32 addresses. I was able to restore the wallet by installing it on another Android device, and I also managed to restore it on the desktop version. However, how can I restore it in Electrum?

Additionally, I always used my wallet with my own ElectrumX server, which was explicitly set in the wallet. When I performed the last recovery attempt, the funds were only restored when I did not specify my ElectrumX server. However, the problem with restoring the wallet in Electrum persists regardless of whether the Electrum wallet is connected to my ElectrumX server or any other public server—the same transactions remain visible, but the full transaction history is still missing.

This issue concerns only standard wallets, not Multisig.

[Perlover]

I wanted to add that I manually found the Bitcoin addresses that were visible in Green Wallet on Android after restoration, whereas those Bitcoin addresses were not visible in the Electrum wallet after restoration. At first, I thought that Green Wallet was generating such Bitcoin addresses for which it did not have the keys, but after checking manually, I found that there were successful transactions from those Bitcoin addresses. Therefore, it seems that internally, at some point, Green Wallet starts generating Bitcoin addresses based on the seed according to its own scheme.

I also tried increasing the GAP limit for scanning from 20 to 1000 within Electrum, but still couldn’t find the Bitcoin addresses that Green Wallet on Android was using.

[LeoComandini]

Hi @Perlover

When you restored on Electrum, which account did you chose?
Have you tried all of them? (p2pkh, p2wpkh-p2sh, p2wpkh)

[Perlover]

When you restored on Electrum, which account did you chose?\nHave you tried all of them? (p2pkh, p2wpkh-p2sh, p2wpkh)

Hi! I selected a p2wpkh type, and the path was specified as m/84'/...

But I also used a feature in Electrum called "Automatically determine accounts" with the BIP39 phrase, where it scans for transactions and finds accounts. It also automatically selected the appropriate path and wallet type when it found my early transactions. The thing is, I could see the first half of the transactions from the wallet, but the recent transactions were missing. So, it doesn't seem like just a mistake in selecting the BIP-32 type and path.

The first time I restored, my own ElectrumX server was specified in Electrum. But when I noticed discrepancies between transactions from the wallet and Green Wallet, I disabled my internal, personal server, restarted Electrum, verified that an external Electrum server was automatically selected, and performed the restoration using the seed. However, I only saw the initial part of the transaction up to around March I did not see the other transactions from the last few days that I made.

[Perlover]

As an option, I could consider another way to transfer the wallet seed to you, but to protect against scammers who have already written here once in this thread, the developers could post their PGP key here, and I could also send my seed encrypted with that key here so you could try to recover and identify the problem. This would be a last resort if we're unable to resolve the issue by other means. I don't have any funds there right now anyway.

However, I did recover the funds by installing the Green Wallet on another Android device (using the seed) and transferring them from there. But there is another related problem. The thing is, when I specified my ElectrumX server, I saw one set of transactions and one balance, but when I set the Green Wallet to automatically select the server, the balance was completely different and some of the transactions were different. I was only able to transfer from the wallet that was being scanned by the automatically selected server, and the wallet that was being scanned by my server encountered an error when sending the transaction because some of the UTXO outputs had already been spent.

[LeoComandini]

the recent transactions were missing

Can you see the recent transactions from electrum if you restore another wallet type? (same BIP39 mnemonic)

Please try with these derivation path:

• m/84h/0h/0h (p2wpkh account 0)
• m/49h/0h/0h (p2wpkh-p2sh account 0)
• m/44h/0h/0h (p2pkh account 0)
• m/84h/0h/1h (p2wpkh account 1)
• m/49h/0h/1h (p2wpkh-p2sh account 1)
• m/44h/0h/1h (p2pkh account 1)
  ...

my own ElectrumX server was specified in Electrum

As long as your personal server is running correctly, you can continue using it for the sake of this investigation. AFAICT issue should be independent from the chosen Electrum server.

[Perlover]

Alright, I'll make sure to go through all the options (paths) you mentioned for Electrum. I'll do this tomorrow and let you know.

[Perlover]

I have been experimenting lately, investigating the addresses where coins were sent but were not visible in Electrum. I have almost figured out the issue.

I used the https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39 tool on GitHub, a BIP39 generator, and found the address that Electrum does not recognize. Upon further investigation, it turned out to be a change address with index 206, while Electrum scans change addresses with a gap limit of 20. When I forcefully set the gap limit to 200 through the Electrum console, this gap limit applies only to receiving addresses, and it still leaves change addresses unscanned beyond a depth of 20.

For some reason, Green Wallet started using a high index for change addresses right away, because in Electrum I don't see any transactions on change addresses from 0 to 19. This turned out to be the main problem. Now I'm looking for a way to increase the gap limit for change addresses in Electrum.

[Perlover]

For some reason, Green Wallet started using a high index for change addresses right away, because in Electrum I don't see any transactions on change addresses from 0 to 19.

To clarify, Electrum by default generates change address indices from 0 to 9—only 10 in total—and all of them were empty, so it didn’t look any further. When I checked the transaction details for the wallet I restored on the desktop, I saw that the first change was sent to change index 12. In other words, the very first transaction, for some reason, sent the change not to index zero but to nineteen. As a result, Electrum didn’t recognize this change during restoration and didn’t search to a sufficient depth.

[Perlover]

I did now in console:

for i in range(0, 100): print(wallet.create_new_address(True))

And I saw all transactions!

UPDATE: However, I didn’t quite see everything. I had to run another cycle to retrieve other change addresses because some of them were hidden beyond the GAP limit. There is clearly an issue with Green Wallet—it uses large "gaps" for change addresses. This needs to be adjusted somehow... Perhaps it's because I enabled Lightning. Maybe after each Lightning transaction, it increments the future change index even if no change is generated?

[ardier16]

@Perlover thanks for the detailed investigation, and apologies for the delayed response!

The addresses you found use the standard BIP84 change path, so the recovery phrase remains BIP39 compatible. Electrum missed them because the used change-address indices were beyond its internal-chain lookahead.

The underlying address-reservation behavior is implemented in GDK rather than the Blockstream Android app, so I’ve moved this issue to the GDK repository for tracking.