You opened Yoroi to move some ADA, and the app asked for your spending password. You typed the one you were sure of. Wrong. Tried the variation with the capital letter. Wrong again. Now the balance is sitting right there on screen and you can’t touch it.
Here’s the short version. If you still have your 15-word recovery phrase, you can fix this in about five minutes, and your ADA is safe the whole time. If you’ve lost the phrase too, it gets harder, but there’s one thing you need to know before you touch anything: don’t uninstall Yoroi. More on why below, because that mistake is the one that turns a recoverable wallet into a lost one.
What the spending password actually does
You set the spending password when you created the wallet. Since then it’s been required every time you send ADA, or delegate to a stake pool. Without it you can still open Yoroi and watch your balance sit there. You just can’t move it.
The password only exists on your device. Yoroi is non-custodial, made by EMURGO, so no one there can reset it for you. Anyone claiming to be Yoroi support offering you a reset link is a scam.
It also encrypts your keys, so it isn’t sitting anywhere as readable text you could dig out of the app. Hold onto that detail for the harder case below.
How to Reset Your Spending Password on Yoroi Wallet
If you have your 15-word recovery phrase, you can reset the spending password by restoring the wallet. Your ADA never moves during this. You’re just rebuilding the local wallet with a fresh password.
Before you start, confirm the phrase is right. Type it somewhere safe and check every word against the BIP-39 word list. Watch for autocorrect swaps and words that are close but wrong. If you’re not certain the phrase works, test it on a different browser or device first, so you don’t remove your only working install for nothing.
Here’s the reset on the Yoroi extension or mobile app:
- Go to Settings, then Wallet.
- Click Remove wallet and confirm. This does not touch your ADA. It only clears the local copy.
- Back on the main screen, choose Add New Wallet, then Restore Wallet, then Cardano.
- Enter your 15-word recovery phrase in the right order.
- Set a new spending password when prompted, and type it twice.
That’s it. Write the new password down offline before you close the app, or drop it into a password manager. This is the step people skip, and it’s why they end up back here in six months.
The hard case: you lost the recovery phrase too
This is where you stop and read before doing anything.
A lot of guides tell you to remove and restore the wallet as step one. If you’ve lost your recovery phrase, do not do that. Removing the wallet wipes the encrypted key data off your device, and right now that data is the only copy of your keys you have left. Uninstalling Yoroi or clearing the app does the same thing. So better leave the install exactly as it is.
Can the password be read out of the app? No. This comes up constantly on the Cardano Forum, and the answer is always the same: the spending password encrypts your key material, so it can’t be pulled back out of the same file it’s protecting. There’s no cache trick, no hidden log, no decrypt button.
What can be done is different. As long as the wallet is still installed, password guesses can be tested against that encrypted data, fast and offline, until the right one hits. That path depends entirely on the install still being there.
Before you consider that, try to remember. It sounds too simple, but focused recall works more often than you’d expect. Write down every password you’ve ever used, including old ones and the one with a birthday and a symbol on the end. Note common typos, whether caps lock was on, which keyboard language you had set. People sit with this list for twenty minutes and the right one surfaces. Try that first.
If the recall list runs dry, the realistic options are:
- You have the wallet still installed. Password testing against the encrypted keys is possible. Leave it untouched and get the case looked at.
- You have most of the seed phrase. If you’re missing a few words, or one is misspelled or out of order, the phrase can often be rebuilt. There’s even a free community tool, PySeedRecover, that handles missing words and typos using the BIP-39 checksum. Run it offline, from its official source, and never type your phrase into a website version.
- You have nothing. No phrase, no install, no backup files, no other device you used it on. Then it’s honest to say the ADA is very likely gone, and no legitimate service can change that.
When it’s worth getting help
We’re Crypto Recovers. We’ve been getting people back into locked wallets since 2019, over 200 of them, and Yoroi cases land in our inbox regularly. We work as the technical helper here, like a locksmith who repairs the lock and hands you back the key. We never touch your ADA. You move it yourself, to a wallet only you control.
A Yoroi case is usually worth an assessment when:
- The wallet is still installed and you’ve run out of password guesses.
- Your recovery phrase is partial, or you think a word or two is wrong. We can rebuild up to four missing words.
- You have old wallet files or a browser profile from a device you used Yoroi on, and you’re not sure what’s in them.
How it works: we look at your case for free and tell you honestly whether it’s workable. If it is, you sign a contract before any sensitive data changes hands. The fee is 20% of what we recover, paid only after it actually works. No recovery, no fee. We never ask for your recovery phrase or password over email or chat, and neither should anyone else.
