Monero Wallet Recovery: Zero Balance, Restore Height, Stuck Transactions and Lost Seeds

Short answer: if your Monero balance is missing, your coins are almost certainly still on the blockchain. The usual causes are a wallet that has not finished syncing, a restore height set too late, outputs still in their 10-block lock, or a remote node that is out of date. As long as you have your seed phrase, you can restore the wallet in any compatible app and rescan.

We went through the most common “lost Monero” threads on r/monerosupport and r/Monero in 2026 — “Did I just lose all my monero??”, “Received half the fund I sent to myself”, “transaction stuck on 0 conf for 4+ hours” — and matched each to the fix in the wallet developers' own documentation. Start with the section that matches your symptom.

First: identify which seed you have

Most failed restores are a seed typed into the wrong wallet. Count the words.

Legacy 25-word seeds exist in 12 languages. If your words are not English, select the matching language before restoring. Both legacy seeds and Polyseed support an optional passphrase (called “seed offset” in the GUI). The same words with a different passphrase open a completely different, empty wallet — a common reason for a zero balance after restore.

Balance shows zero after restoring

1. The restore height is too late

The restore height is the block where your wallet starts scanning. Anything received before it is invisible. Too high means missing funds; too low only means a slower scan. When in doubt, go lower.

Monero produces a block roughly every two minutes, about 720 blocks a day. At the time of writing the chain is at height 3,778,624 (7 October 2026). To estimate a height from a date, subtract 720 for every day since then and round down generously. A 16-word Polyseed stores the wallet's birthday, so you can skip this step. Feather also accepts a date instead of a number.

2. The wallet has not finished syncing

The balance only becomes correct once the wallet has scanned up to the current block. Compare the wallet's block height with the live height on our network page.

3. Your remote node is behind

If the node stopped syncing, your wallet stops too. Switch to another node from our live node list, which shows each node's height and latency, or run your own.

4. You opened a different account or wallet

Monero wallets can hold several accounts, each with its own subaddresses. Cake Wallet's support checklist lists “wrong account selected” as a frequent cause.

5. You need a rescan

• Feather: Wallet → Advanced → Rescan spent. Also check you have not frozen coins in the Coins tab.
• Cake Wallet: Rescan, starting from a date about a week before your first transaction.
• CLI: rescan_spent refreshes which outputs are spent; rescan_bc drops the cache and rescans the chain.

A rescan deletes locally stored transaction keys. If you need a tx key as payment proof, export it first.

“I sent XMR to myself and only half arrived”

This is the most common panic post, and nothing is lost. Monero spends whole outputs. If you send 1 XMR from a 3 XMR output, the other 2 come back to you as change. Every new output, including change, is locked for 10 blocks (about 20 minutes) by consensus rules. Your wallet shows it as “locked” or “unconfirmed” until then. Wait 20 minutes.

Transaction stuck or failed

Stuck at 0 confirmations

Monero blocks are not full most of the time; on 7 October 2026 the mempool held 17 transactions. A transaction that sits at zero for hours was usually never relayed by your node. Check the TXID in our transaction checker. If it is not found, the network never saw it.

“Failed” status

Feather's documentation explains that a failed transaction means the node did not relay it. Resend through a different node, or run relay_tx <txid> on your own node. If your wallet still shows the funds as spent, run rescan_spent (or Feather's Rescan spent) to release them.

How long until funds come back?

Unconfirmed transactions are dropped from node mempools after three days. Once that happens, or after a rescan, the inputs are spendable again.

“Double spend seen”

This means the network saw another transaction using the same inputs, usually because the wallet broadcast twice (common with hardware wallets that retried). It does not mean someone stole your funds. Rescan spent and check your balance.

Forgot the wallet password

The password encrypts the .keys file on your computer. There is no reset. But the password only protects that file — it is not part of your seed. Restore from the seed into a new wallet and choose a new password. If you have neither the password nor the seed, the funds cannot be recovered by anyone.

Your wallet or service shut down

• MyMonero shut down on 6 January 2026. Its servers no longer work, so the 13-word seed can only be restored in Cake Wallet, which took over the project. See our web wallets article for alternatives.
• Exodus removed Monero on 18 August 2025. Import either the Exodus 12-word phrase or the 25-word Monero seed into Cake Wallet. If you do not know your wallet's start date, Exodus suggests 26 April 2019, the day it added XMR.
• LocalMonero closed in November 2024. Coins left in its escrow were only recoverable during its wind-down period; this is the clearest argument for never leaving XMR on a platform. Current options are in where to swap Monero.

When the funds really are gone

If outgoing transactions you did not make appear in your history, your seed was exposed. The thread “Monero stolen from my Cake Wallet” (56 upvotes, 59 comments) traced back to a seed stored online, not a wallet bug. Monero transactions cannot be reversed. Create a new wallet on a clean device and move anything left immediately. Our security checklist covers how seeds usually leak.

FAQ

Restoring into a new app? Compare current options in our wallet directory or read Monero wallets by platform.