Phantasma’s wallets have undergone significant changes and upgrades over the past two years. This has led to massive improvements in both functionality and user experience, but also comes with a need to always be mindful of supporting legacy formats and the quirks of early versions. This holds true particularly for the Poltergeist wallet, where the seed word format and the way private keys are securely stored has evolved in several steps.
Streamlining and unification
As a result, we now have several legacy formats and a current one, and backwards compatibility does have an impact on user experience for new users creating wallets and importing their seed phrases. Particularly through additional popups than can be confusing for inexperienced users. On Phantasma’s end, this generates a need for additional tech support resources.
To streamline user experience and simplify the process for new users onboarding, Poltergeist will cease to support legacy formats in the near future. A separate app for decoding of legacy formats will be released at the same time.
Migrate to the new standard
To simplify the future both for you and for our tech support team, we kindly ask all our users who created wallets in Poltergeist before April 2021 (in Poltergeist v2.3 and earlier versions) to migrate to the new seed words format. This will allow you to back up your seed words and associated WIF (or HEX) private key in the current format that has been used since v2.4 onwards and is Metamask compatible. If you currently have your WIF / HEX format private key backed up but not your seed words, this will allow you to also get a fresh set of seed words. Seed words are a flexible representation of the private key that also enables users to generate multiple wallets from a single seed phrase
As part of this unification process, support for the new seed word format will be added to the Ecto wallet, which means that you can use the same seed words across Poltergeist, Ecto and Metamask along with many other popular wallets. These are the small parts of the puzzle to bring greater adoption through optimizing user experience.
Please note that failure to migrate your legacy wallet will not in any way result in loss of access to your funds, but it does mean that you will need to perform additional steps using the new tools if you ever need to recover your wallet in the future.
Prepare for migration
This quick tutorial assumes that you are migrating a wallet named “OldWallet” that may hold funds on both Phantasma as well as other supported chains. Use a trusted encrypted database tool like KeePass2, KeePass XC or similar to securely store your private keys and seed phrases.
Make sure you are using Poltergeist v2.6.1 or later when migrating. This procedure is only necessary for wallets created with Poltergeist v2.3 or earlier, and does not apply to wallets created with Ecto or Phantom wallet which have not previously supported the use of seed words.
Note that for users migrating a large number of wallets, Poltergeist v2.6.1 supports generating an unlimited number of wallets from a single seed phrase which will reduce the time needed for the migration process.
If you run into any issues or questions, please see the FAQ below the tutorial, and as always, reach out to one of our Telegram admins if you need any assistance!
Four simple steps
- Double check that you have a backup of OldWallet’s private key / WIF
2. Create a new wallet named “NewWallet”, back up the seed phrase and private key / WIF
3. Check whether you have any assets on OldWallet’s ETH, NEO or BSC addresses. If you do, transfer these (normal transaction) to NewWallet’s corresponding address (ETH -> ETH, NEO -> NEO, BSC -> BSC). Verify that there are no more funds in the ETH, NEO and BSC addresses.
4. In OldWallet, choose [Account], [Manage Account], [Migrate]. Paste the private key (WIF) of NewWallet (generated during step 2), confirm, then READ and confirm the reminder popup to initiate migration.
Increasing the gas fee limit
Note: If you see a gas fee error during migration, log out of the wallet, go to [settings], switch Nexus from [Main Net] to [Custom]. Then scroll down to Phantasma fee limit and increase the number, for example from 1600 to 16000. Repeat as needed if you encounter this error again, as some wallets with a large number of NFTs will require more gas for the migration.
Your Soul Master and CROWN rewards are safe
Migrating TestWallet to TestWallet2’s private key (WIF) will preserve your Soul Master reward and CROWN eligibility status with no penalties. Unclaimed KCAL will be auto claimed during migration. The duplicate TestWallet2 will be deleted upon successful migration, while TestWallet will remain (under the private key / WIF generated for TestWallet2).
FAQ
Q — How can I tell which version of wallet I used to create the wallet in the first place being that that this only effects Poltergeist v2.3 or earlier?
A — You cannot differentiate them, so if in doubt just migrate.
Q- When you reference wallet name, this isn’t the on-chain name but rather the name given during the set up phase?
A — Name given locally in Poltergeist yes, regardless of its on chain name.
Q — Transferring funds, are fees to do this required, ie ETH / GAS / BNB?
A — All txs on other chains will be normal txs on those chains so ETH needs ETH, Neo needs GAS, BSC needs BNB — as mentioned above in the tutorial steps those are to be done before migration of the Phantasma mainnet wallet to a new private key (because the other chains have no such migration feature).
Q — I’ll migrate but if one chooses not to, are there any consequences?
A — Not immediately but later Poltergeist will likely provide a popup every time you open your wallet asking you to please perform the migration — however, you would always be able to access your funds.
Q — If I have imported a wallet originally made in Poltergeist to Ecto, is the migration process still needed?
A — Yes, you should still migrate your wallet to a freshly generated seed / WIF
Q — I’m a verified artist on GhostMarket, how will this affect me?
A — GhostMarket will be adding your new address to your verified artist profile, and both your old and new addresses will retain their name and be shown as verified
The author has migrated a vast number of wallets during the testing phase, setting a Phantasma Gas fee limit of 70000. This requires you to have ~0.7 KCAL in the wallet for the fee and allowed migration of dozens of wallets with multiple assets and NFTs without issues.
Please note that a small number of wallets containing several thousand NFTs will require extra patience when migrating. Poltergeist v2.6.1 enables sending all your NFTs in batches of 100 NFTs at a time to the new wallet before migrating the remaining assets. From the user side, this means you simply select all your NFTs by clicking [Select] in the NFT “send” window, click “To transfer list” and proceed to input the destination address and confirm the transaction. Poltergeist will then execute all the transactions automatically while you grab a cup of coffee. Mind that Poltergeist may seem to hang / stop functioning while Poltergeist prepares the transactions due to the sheer amount of data being handled. Please do not close or cancel the process, simply wait for it to move to the next step.
Happy migrating!
Leave A Comment