For about a decade, MyMonero was the answer to a specific question: "I want to check my Monero, but I do not want to download an 80 GB blockchain onto this laptop." You opened a browser tab, pasted a 13-word seed, and your balance appeared in seconds. No sync, no install, no 40-minute wait.
That browser tab is no longer an option, and if you are reading this, you probably found out the way most people do — you went to log in and the wallet was not there.
Here is the short version: your Monero is not in MyMonero. It never was. It is on the Monero blockchain, and your seed phrase is the only thing that has ever controlled it. A wallet service disappearing does not move, freeze, or destroy your coins any more than losing your calculator changes your bank balance. What you have lost is a viewer, and viewers are replaceable.
The rest of this guide covers what that actually means in practice, how to get your funds visible again, and how to pick a replacement without walking into one of the scam sites that appear every single time a popular wallet goes offline.
First, understand what you actually own
This is the part that makes everything else make sense, so it is worth sixty seconds.
When you created a MyMonero account, no account was created in the normal sense. There was no username-and-password record sitting in a database that owned your coins. Instead, your seed phrase was used to mathematically derive two private keys, and those keys are what control your funds.
MyMonero held your view key on its servers so it could scan the blockchain and tell you your balance quickly. That is the trick that made it fast — you were not scanning, a server was scanning for you. But your spend key was derived in your browser and used there. MyMonero could see your incoming payments. It could never spend them.
So the practical consequence of the shutdown is narrow and specific: you lost the fast-scanning service, not the money.
If you have your seed phrase, you have your funds. Everything below is about choosing a new lens. Nothing below is urgent in the sense of "act now or lose money" — take your time and do it carefully.
What if you do not have your seed?
This is the genuinely bad case, so let us deal with it honestly before moving on.
If you only ever logged into MyMonero with an email and password and never wrote down the 13 words, your situation depends entirely on whether you can still retrieve that seed. MyMonero's login derived your keys from your credentials, so the seed was always recoverable while the service was running. With the service gone, that derivation path is gone with it unless you have a local copy.
Places worth checking before you conclude anything:
- Password managers. People very often saved the seed alongside the login. Search your vault for "monero", "mymonero", or 13 consecutive lowercase words.
- Old note apps, encrypted files, screenshots. Search your machine for the first two words of any seed you half-remember.
- The MyMonero desktop or mobile app, if you ever installed it. Local app data may still hold your wallet file on a machine you still own. Check before you wipe any old device.
- Paper. Boxes, safes, the back of a book. It is worth an hour of looking.
If none of that turns anything up, be very careful about what you do next, because this is precisely the moment people get robbed. There is no service, tool, or "recovery specialist" that can regenerate a Monero seed from an email address. Anyone offering that is running a scam, without exception. Monero's cryptography is exactly as unforgiving as its privacy is strong — that is the same property, viewed from two sides.
Your options, honestly compared
There is no single best Monero wallet; there is a best wallet for your threat model and your patience. The real trade-off is almost always privacy versus convenience, and it is worth being clear-eyed about where each option sits.
| Option | Syncs by | Privacy | Setup effort | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Official Monero GUI (own node) | Your own full node | Highest — nothing leaves your machine | Hours (80 GB+ download) | Large holdings, maximum privacy |
| Feather Wallet | Own or remote node | High | ~15 minutes | Desktop users wanting a light client |
| Cake Wallet / Monero.com | Remote node | Medium | ~5 minutes | Phone-first, everyday spending |
| Web wallet (light-wallet server) | A server, using your view key | Medium | Under a minute | Checking balances, no-install access |
| Hardware wallet (Ledger/Trezor) | Paired with GUI/Feather | Highest for spend key | ~30 minutes | Long-term cold storage |
A few notes that the table cannot capture:
Running your own node is genuinely the gold standard. If privacy is your primary concern and you have the disk space and patience, the official GUI paired with your own monerod is the least compromised setup that exists. Everything else on this list is a convenience trade.
"Remote node" and "light wallet" are not the same thing. A remote node means your wallet does the scanning but asks someone else's daemon for blocks. A light wallet means a server does the scanning for you using your view key. The second is faster and leaks more. Both are reasonable; they are just different.
Do not treat a hot wallet as a vault. Whatever you pick, the old advice holds: keep spending money in something convenient and savings in something cold.
Recovering a MyMonero 13-word seed
MyMonero used a 13-word mnemonic, which is not the same as Monero's standard 25-word seed. This trips people up constantly, so it is worth being precise: a 13-word MyMonero seed encodes a 128-bit secret, while the standard Monero seed encodes 256 bits and includes a checksum word. Both are legitimate; they are just different encodings.
The practical consequence is that not every Monero wallet accepts a 13-word seed. If you paste your MyMonero words into a wallet that only understands the 25-word format, you will get an "invalid seed" error, and it does not mean your seed is broken.
Wallets that handle the MyMonero 13-word format include Feather, Cake Wallet, and browser wallets built on the same light-wallet architecture — including ours. When you restore, you should get back the same address you had on MyMonero. If the address is different, stop: you have either mistyped a word or restored into the wrong format, and you should not send funds to the new address until it matches.
Set a restore height if the wallet asks. This tells the scanner which block to start from. Guess a date slightly *before* you first used MyMonero. Too early only costs you time; too late can hide transactions and make your balance look wrong. We wrote a whole guide on this — see restore heights explained.
How to avoid getting robbed during a migration
Every time a well-known wallet goes offline, a wave of fake replacements appears, because the attacker knows exactly what you are about to do: search for an alternative and paste a seed phrase into the first thing that looks official. Bluntly, this is the highest-risk moment in the entire lifecycle of a Monero holding.
Rules that will keep you safe:
- Type URLs by hand, or use a bookmark. Do not click sponsored search results. Ads impersonating wallet sites are a standing problem and they look perfect.
- A wallet that asks for your seed on a page you did not navigate to deliberately is a phishing page. No exceptions.
- Check for source code you can actually read. "Open source" printed on a landing page means nothing; a public repository whose code matches what is being served means something. If a project cannot tell you how to verify the running site against its source, treat that as an answer.
- Prefer wallets that derive keys locally. Your spend key should never be transmitted anywhere, for any reason, ever. If a site sends your seed to a server "to set up your account", close the tab.
- Test with a small amount first. Restore, confirm the address matches, send a trivial amount, confirm it arrives. Then move the rest.
- Be suspicious of urgency. No legitimate wallet migration has a deadline. Scam sites invent one.
Where a browser wallet fits — and where it does not
We build monero-web, a free and open-source browser wallet, so treat this section as the interested party talking. We would rather be straight with you about the trade-offs than oversell it.
A browser wallet is the right tool when you want what MyMonero gave you: fast access to your balance from any machine, with nothing to install. It uses the same light-wallet architecture MyMonero ran for years — a server (in our case a self-hosted monero-lws instance) scans the chain with your view key, while your spend key is derived and used entirely inside your browser tab and never transmitted.
That means the honest privacy statement is: the server can see your balance and your incoming transactions. It cannot spend, and it never receives your spend key. Anyone who tells you a light wallet leaks nothing is either confused or selling something. If that trade is unacceptable for your situation, run a full node — that is a legitimate answer, and we document how to self-host the entire stack precisely because we think you should not have to trust us.
Where a browser wallet is not the right tool: storing significant long-term savings. Use cold storage for that. Use a browser wallet the way you use the cash in your pocket.
A short checklist
If you want the whole thing compressed into steps:
- Find your 13-word seed. Do not proceed without it.
- Pick a replacement wallet that supports 13-word MyMonero seeds.
- Verify you reached the real site — typed URL or bookmark, never an ad.
- Restore the seed and set a restore height from before your first MyMonero use.
- Confirm the restored address matches your old MyMonero address.
- Send a small test amount before moving anything significant.
- Consider moving long-term savings to cold storage while you are already thinking about it.
The larger lesson
MyMonero going away is annoying, but it is also a useful demonstration of something Monero gets right. A custodial exchange shutting down is a crisis, because the exchange holds your coins. A non-custodial wallet shutting down is an inconvenience, because you hold your coins and merely lose a piece of software.
The seed phrase you wrote down years ago is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Keep it safe, keep it offline, and treat every wallet — including ours — as a replaceable lens onto a chain that does not care which software you use.