Follow these steps to recover funds from your Unchained vault in the event Unchained isn't available
In the event that you cannot access your Unchained Capital vault for any reason, you always have the ability to spend your bitcoin using another wallet application (known as external recovery). Our recommended method is, of course, the open-source tool that we built specifically for this purpose: Caravan. But there are other solutions available, such as Sparrow.
Warning: You should only spend from your Unchained vault using Caravan or a third-party wallet in an emergency. Transactions made using Caravan may cause your vault balance to be displayed incorrectly.
What you’ll need
To recover your funds, you’ll need to prepare the following:
- Your two hardware devices (keys)
- Your multisig configuration file
- Our open-source multisig tool Caravan.
Don't have your multisig configuration file? Read our guide to find out where it is and how to download it from your Unchained dashboard.
How to spend from your vault using Caravan
- Navigate to Caravan in Chrome, Brave, or Firefox browser. There's also an easy-to-remember URL that redirects to our GitHub page (which, importantly, operates separate from unchained.com): caravanmultisig.com.
- Where the page shows "Start using caravan by choosing to either make a multisig wallet or fully stateless address", choose Wallet.
- Select Import Wallet Configuration and upload your multisig configuration file (it should be a .json file). Alternatively, if you are an experienced user, you can also copy and paste the extended public keys from the file you saved directly into Caravan.
- Caravan will display your 2-of-3 multisig wallet and its name, as well as the three keys that were used to build it. One of these should be "Unchained".
- Select which bitcoin client to gather wallet balances from, either Public from blockstream.info, or Private. Experienced users: you can choose Private to pull details from your own full node if you wish.
- Click Confirm. Caravan will load your wallet details, including balances and transactions.
- To spend your bitcoin, select Send and paste a receive address (ensure it is a bitcoin address) in the To field.
- Double-check that the To address is correct by verifying at least the first and last 6 digits.
- In most cases, you should leave the fee rate at default. You can adjust the fee rate down to pay less for the transaction and wait longer for a confirmation, or adjust the fee higher if you’d like the transaction to be settled sooner. Learn more about fees.
- Enter the amount you’d like to send (you can click Max to send the maximum amount minus fees), and click Preview Transaction.
- You'll be shown the full details of the transaction. To move forward, click Sign Transaction. You will need to sign with two keys (hardware devices). These will be the two hardware devices that you used to set up your Unchained vault and performed quarterly key checks with.
- Use the drop-down menu to select the key you'd like to sign from.
- Connect your hardware device to your computer, select the proper model device, click Sign. You should be taken to a new page powered by the respective hardware wallet’s bridge software. If it's a Trezor wallet, for example, you will be prompted to enter your PIN and confirm the transaction on your hardware wallet. Ensure the send address is correct on the hardware wallet screen.
- Repeat steps 12 and 13 for the second key.
- Select Broadcast Transaction from Caravan. This will send your transaction to the bitcoin network and cannot be undone, so double-check all details are correct.
- You should be notified that the Transaction successfully broadcast.
That’s it! You should have now completed a transaction from your vault without any interaction with the Unchained platform. Depending on the speed of confirmations, you should see the balance update on the receiving wallet shortly. You can also track the progress of the transaction on a block explorer like Blockstream Explorer, by searching for your transaction ID.