You've probably seen the big anouncement from LeoDex that they added another new feature, create a wallet in less then 60 seconds.
One reason it can go so fast is that you don't have to write down or verify a recovery phrase — the traditional way of recovering a self-custody wallet if the original device is lost.
That made me wonder: if I don't get a recovery phrase, how do I recover the wallet if my device dies, my browser data gets deleted, or I simply want to move to another device?
Mane itself makes clear that the password is not the answer. During wallet creation it says:
“This unlocks Mane on this device only. It isn't a recovery method.”
The passkey is also optional, and after creating the wallet I could not find any option to view a recovery phrase, export a private key, or create a backup. The wallet menu only lets me disconnect the connected wallets.
Mane also lets you import a wallet from a Keystore file with its password, but I couldn't find a way to export or download a Keystore backup of a Mane-created wallet either.
So I started investigating what Mane actually stores locally.
What I found surprised me: Mane does in fact generate a normal 12-word recovery phrase. It is stored encrypted inside the local wallet vault. Using the wallet password, I was able to decrypt my own test wallet locally and recover those 12 words.
With those 12 words I independently derived the exact EVM and Bitcoin addresses that Mane had created for my test wallet.
m/44'/60'/0'/0/0 → 0x4A92...1001 ✅ exact Mane EVM address
m/84'/0'/0'/0/0 → bc1q4h8...hgy3a ✅ exact Mane BTC address
Underneath Mane, one recovery phrase is used to deterministically generate the different wallet addresses, just like many traditional crypto wallets do. Mane simply doesn't show that recovery phrase to the user.
And this is where I have a problem.
Hiding a seed phrase can actually be good UX. Most users don't want to deal with 12 words. But if you remove the traditional recovery method, you need to replace it with something else.
At the moment I have not been able to find that replacement.
If my local Mane vault disappears, the password isn't a recovery method — Mane explicitly tells me that during wallet creation. The recovery phrase that could restore the wallet is stored inside that local vault, but Mane never gives it to the user.
I wasn't required to create a backup, and I can't find any option afterwards to view the recovery phrase or export a backup of the wallet.
So if that local vault is lost, knowing my password doesn't help me. The password only unlocks the vault that is no longer there. At that point I would need the recovery phrase to recreate the wallet on another device.
And that's the problem: that recovery phrase does exist and it does recover the wallet — I proved that by deriving the exact EVM and Bitcoin addresses from it — but a normal user is never given access to it.
They released this more than a week ago and it's still the same today. Maybe Khal's AI missed it, but I'm surprised the “Team” didn't notice something this fundamental during testing.
If LeoDex adds a proper backup/recovery method that a normal user can actually use after losing their device, then this particular problem is solved. For me Mane Wallet is a hard pass, I've lost my trust with all that happend, but for others it may help. A wallet can hold real BTC, ETH and other assets, so releasing it without an obvious way for the owner to recover it after losing the local data is not something I think should ever happen.
If there is already another recovery mechanism that I have missed, I'm happy to update this post — but it needs to be something available to the normal user who followed the wallet creation process above.
