Wallet Migration

Overview

Migration may follow software replacement, custody change, signer rotation, network upgrade, legal restructuring, or compromise. It can involve importing keys, recreating smart-contract roles, transferring assets, remapping addresses, and retiring old integrations.

Moving balances alone is insufficient. Token approvals, transaction history, labels, derivation paths, recovery factors, fee assets, and contract administrators can remain behind. Importing exposed keys into a new interface does not create new security. Wrong networks or unsupported assets can also become inaccessible.

The plan should inventory every asset, address, signer, permission, contract, record, and dependency. New authority should be generated in a trusted environment when security changes are intended. Pilot transfers, address verification, staged cutover, and parallel monitoring reduce risk. Completion requires source-to-destination reconciliation, permission revocation, tested recovery, and continued observation of retired wallets.

Records for Wallet Migration should preserve account and address identifiers, asset and network identity, policy version, requester, approvers, signed payload or transaction reference, fees, timestamps, status history, confirmations, exceptions, and final balance and accounting effects. For Wallet Migration, corrections must remain linked rather than overwrite the original event.

Wallet Migration should be distinguished from the asset balance and from the application that displays it. For example, a customer-facing success message does not prove that the intended transaction executed on the correct network; operations should verify execution and reconcile the result before irreversible fulfillment.

Material risks for Wallet Migration include credential compromise, malicious destinations, unsupported assets, wrong-network transfers, stale balances, compromised software, provider outage, privacy leakage, and inaccessible recovery material. For Wallet Migration, controls should reflect value, automation, reversibility, and whether the organization or a third party controls signing.