Sia WalletGuide · ~15 minutes
Migrate from Sia-UI to Sia Wallet.
Sia-UI was deprecated in 2024 and no longer transacts on the post-v2 network. Your coins are fine — your seed still derives your address — but they need to move. This guide walks the built-in migration assistant end-to-end, including every edge case reported in r/siacoin during 2024-2026.
Why you're here
Sia-UI was the official desktop wallet from 2015 through 2024. When The Sia Foundation restructured its stack into renterd (renters), hostd (hosts), and walletd (wallets), Sia-UI was deprecated and stopped receiving updates. When the Sia v2 hardfork activated in June 2025, Sia-UI could no longer broadcast valid transactions. Many holders who had parked SC for years found their wallet frozen — not broken, frozen.
The fix is a one-time migration: import your legacy 28 or 29-word seed into a post-v2 wallet, generate a new 12-word BIP39 seed, broadcast a single transaction moving your balance to the new seed's address. After migration, your legacy seed has served its purpose and the new seed is your active wallet going forward.
Before you start
Your legacy 28-word or 29-word Sia-UI seed phrase — written on paper, or exportable from a still-functional Sia-UI install under Wallet → Show Recovery Seed
Sia Wallet v2.12.0 installed on a secure machine. Don't migrate on a borrowed, public, or unfamiliar computer
Blank paper and a pen for writing down the new 12-word BIP39 seed
Approximately 0.001 SC of balance to cover the network fee (deducted from the migration transaction automatically)
Patience through six network confirmations — about one Sia block each, so roughly 60 minutes for full confidence
Migration steps
- 1
Launch Sia Wallet and pick 'Migrate legacy Sia-UI seed'
Open Sia Wallet. If this is a fresh install, you're on the first-run welcome screen. If you have an existing wallet open, go to Accounts → Add Account → Migrate legacy Sia-UI seed. Either entry point lands on the same migration assistant.
- 2
Select your legacy seed length — 28 or 29 words
Sia-UI's standard seed was 28 words. Some older exports and command-line-generated seeds had 29 words with an extra checksum word. If you're unsure, try 28 first. The assistant validates the checksum and tells you if the format is wrong — you can toggle to 29 and retry without penalty.
- 3
Enter your legacy seed
Type or paste the 28 (or 29) words, in order. The assistant validates each word against Sia's legacy seed wordlist as you type — any word not in the list is highlighted. Double-check any highlighted word against your paper before moving on. The seed is validated locally; nothing is transmitted.
- 4
Confirm the balance preview
The assistant derives the legacy addresses from your seed, queries the network for their current balance, and shows: total Siacoin held, total Siafund held (usually zero), and the specific addresses with funds. Confirm the balance matches what you expect. If it doesn't — read the 'edge cases' section below before continuing.
- 5
Generate your new 12-word BIP39 seed
The assistant generates a new 12-word seed. Write it down on paper, in order. The assistant shows the seed one word at a time, large and numbered — you physically have to scroll through it. Confirm three randomly-chosen words back to prove you wrote them down. This screen is the one most people rush through; don't.
- 6
Review the migration transaction
Final screen before broadcast: legacy source address, new destination address, amount being moved, network fee (Fast / Standard / Economy — Standard is recommended for migration). Check the destination address against the first receive address shown on the new wallet confirmation — they should match exactly. Click Broadcast.
- 7
Wait for confirmations
The transaction broadcasts to the Sia network. First confirmation is typically within one block — about 10 minutes. The assistant shows a live confirmation counter. After six confirmations (roughly 60 minutes), the migration is considered settled and safe. You can close the wallet and come back later.
- 8
Finalise and clean up
Once funds confirm in your new wallet, the assistant zeroes the legacy seed from memory and offers two cleanup options: remove the legacy wallet file from disk (if imported from an existing Sia-UI install), and archive the migration record locally. Your new 12-word seed is now your primary. The legacy seed has served its purpose.
Edge cases
I've lost my Sia-UI password but still have the seed
The password protected your local Sia-UI wallet file — it's irrelevant to this migration. Enter your seed directly in the assistant (step 3). The seed derives the addresses independent of any password. You don't need to log into the old Sia-UI at all.
I've lost my seed but Sia-UI still opens
Open Sia-UI, go to Wallet → Show Recovery Seed (you may need the password). Record the seed immediately. Then follow the migration steps above. If Sia-UI won't open on the post-v2 network, use a snapshot build of Sia-UI from 2024 offline (air-gapped) solely to read the seed — do not try to send from it.
My balance is split across multiple legacy addresses
Sia-UI generated multiple receive addresses per wallet. The migration assistant imports all of them from a single seed — at step 4, you'll see each address with its own balance. The single broadcast transaction consolidates all of them into the new wallet's first receive address in one on-chain operation.
I'm migrating a watch-only wallet (seed elsewhere)
If you only have a public Sia-UI address and the seed is in cold storage, bring the seed out of cold storage onto an air-gapped signing machine, run the migration assistant offline to generate the migration transaction, transfer the transaction via USB to an online watch-only wallet, and broadcast. The Advanced Security page covers this flow in detail.
My balance preview shows zero, but I had SC on Sia-UI
Most likely cause: you're entering the wrong seed or the wrong seed length. Double-check the word count (28 vs 29). Check each word for spelling. If the balance is still zero, use siascan.com to look up the addresses you remember receiving SC to in Sia-UI — if those addresses have balance on siascan, the seed you're entering doesn't correspond to them.
Verify the migration on-chain
After the transaction confirms, go to siascan.com (the public Sia block explorer) and look up the new wallet's receive address. You should see a single inbound transaction matching the migration amount and your expected fee. Cross-reference the transaction ID shown in Sia Wallet's transaction history against siascan's transaction page — they should match. This confirms the migration happened on-chain and isn't a local display artefact.
Migration questions
Is it safe to type my legacy seed into the migration assistant?
The seed never leaves your machine. It's held in memory only for the duration of the flow, is never written to disk in plaintext, and is zeroed from RAM when the flow completes. The source code for this path is public at siawallet.tech. For maximum paranoia, run the migration on an offline machine and use the air-gapped workflow.
Can I migrate part of my balance and leave some on the legacy seed?
Technically yes — at step 6 you can modify the amount being moved. Practically, this isn't recommended: leaving coins on a deprecated-wallet seed means you'll have to do a second migration later, and the legacy seed format is increasingly unsupported by post-v2 tooling. Migrate the full balance in one operation.
Does the legacy Sia-UI wallet file get deleted?
Only if you explicitly choose that option at step 8. By default, the legacy file is left untouched so you can archive it. If the wallet file no longer contains keys useful to you (because you've moved the balance), deleting it is fine — but a copy in an encrypted archive is a reasonable belt-and-braces backup.