Hi OP.

A cold wallet is a wallet that’s never been exposed online.

I’d say that the other kind of wallets come in “levels of heat”.

I personally wouldn’t use any wallet that is in a Windows environment; be it a standalone app or a browser extension. I would even extend to saying that this kind of wallet is just about as “hot” as an exchange wallet (which is always custodial). The only way I would use a wallet on a PC is if the OS is Linux.

Some will say to go the hardware wallet route. Here, you are trusting the manufacturer. With the recent Ledger fiasco, this a huge NO for me as well.

If you are simply storing (multisig wallets aside), an airgapped Linux PC or an airgapped Cell Phone with MEW OFFLINE is by far the best option. MEW is fully audited and open-source. So long as you are downloading a hash verified MEW and the Offline PC that you are using to generate your seed phrase/keystore/private keys is clean, you are very safe.

Create the wallet, note the generated public address, remove it, then try to restore it and compare to see if the generated public address is the same. When storing them coins, send a bit first and check first before sending the rest.

Take care.

I am sure it is in one of the following derivation paths:

M/44H/60H/0H/0 M/44H/60H/0H M/44’/60’/0’/0/0

I read somewhere that likes of MetaMask and Trust Wallet only use specific derivation paths (looks like MEW also now does this).

Did some digging and I can see Coinomi Wallet seems to be able to support importing wallet phrases with a custom derivation path. See here.

Important:

• Use the mobile app with a clean phone.

• Jot down the public key of the address containing the balances (the one you can see via Etherscan).

• Go offline on the phone with Coinomi installed. Follow the guide in the article above.

What you will be aiming for is to end up with the same public address. You may not see the balance in the wallet because you are doing all these “trial and error” offline. It might be a good idea to have another wallet ready before all these (one that you are confident that you can access and restore later on). You can go online on that phone with the wallet app once you are ready to make the transfer to the new wallet you prepared earlier. Good luck.

Hi OP.

In the below thread, you have got the following comment exchange with another user:

Deminero30:

When you first set it up, was it the first address you used?

For_Kac:

yes

Deminero30

Is the address you get, different from the one with the coins?

For_Kac

no

If the address you use the first address and the one you get when you restore (that has zero balance in MEW) is the same as the one in Etherscan (with the coins), then it’s just MEW not fetching your balance when you restore. Your funds is still there. This is especially true if you are using MEW OFFLINE (please verify your source and check hash to make sure it’s not an alternate malware version designed to leak your keys). MEW maybe audited and is open source but that can also subject it for alterations by malicious actors.

Please be careful when you are restoring your wallet in MEW (or any other wallet app or hardware wallet) using your seed phrase.