How to access wallet only with a private key

Question

I don't have a seed phrase. I have private key, ss58, public key, accountID key.

Need a seed phrase to access polkadot.js wallet.

When I put the private key in the seed key input box, the ss58 address is different.

I think

1. Is there a way to access wallet with a private key?
2. Is there a way to get a seed key with a private key?

Answer 1

To access the wallet with a private key (secret seed) and get its secret seed phrase (that you referred to as the seed key, but is also known as the mnemonic):

• Install subkey by following the steps in the Installation section here.

• Run the subkey inspect command as shown in the example in the Subkey Inspect section here, and provide the private key (secret seed) for the uri argument to display the associated secret phrase and public key (ss58).

• Important notes:

  • It may be safest to run the above commands on an air-gapped local machine with a fresh installation of an operating system that isn't infected.
  • Follow security best practices such as verifying the checksum or GPG keys of any files that you download from the internet if available to check they were not intercepted and infected.
  • It may be faster to install subkey from inside a Docker container by following these steps
  • If you want to avoid entering your private key or secret phrase in the command line where it may be stored in history or tracked by key loggers, you may wish to write a script like this so you can enter the private key in a text file secret_input.txt, and then run cat secret_input.txt | xargs subkey inspect $1 > secret_input.txt to output the secret phrase in another file called secret_input.txt
  • It may be worthwhile importing the secret phrase into Polkadot Vault (Parity Signer) by following their instructions on and air-gapped device and using that to interact with Polkadot.js via scanning QR codes.
  • If you are using a desktop machine and you're interacting with the Polkadot.js Extension, and you're not using Polkadot Vault or a hardware wallet then you may wish to export your keys in bulk as a backup to a password encrypted JSON file, so you may conveniently re-import them all to that same machine or other machines.