Recover an Old Zcash Wallet Before the Sprout Freeze: wallet.dat, zc Addresses and Sprout Recovery

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As Shawn says, the transparent pool is separate from the shielded pools.

The transparent pool is NOT being put on ice. Only Sprout.

For old Zcash recovery, these are the transparent address and private-key prefixes to look for:

  1. t1... - normal transparent Zcash address from launch in 2016. Bitcoin-style P2PKH using secp256k1. Examples: early miners, exchanges, Trezor/Ledger users, Jaxx, Coinomi and Zcash4Win.
  2. t3... - transparent P2SH/multisig address from launch. Much less common. Examples: zcashd multisig, custody or scripted setups.
  3. 5... - old uncompressed WIF (Wallet Import Format) private key for a t1... address. Common in early paper wallets, key generators, and zcashd exports (of an imported one). If you swept one into Exodus, the funds moved to the Exodus seed, so check both.
  4. K... / L... - compressed WIF private keys for t1... addresses. These can appear in key exports from Jaxx/Coinomi-era and later transparent wallets such as ZecWallet.

If one of these transparent addresses or keys controls your ZEC, it is not being put on ice. There is no current transparent-pool deadline, but you may want to recover it into a modern wallet and/or move it into the Ironwood shielded pool. The Orchard pool is now exit-only.

Be aware that very old wallet software may still build V4 transactions. Under the current NU7 plan, V4 transactions will no longer be accepted by consensus, so old software could stop being able to send even transparent ZEC. Older wallets may also run into fee-policy problems because they predate ZIP 317’s action-based fees, introduced after the spam attacks, or do not set the correct consensus branch ID.

The transparent ZEC itself is not frozen and remains spendable using modern transaction formats. You may need to restore an old mobile/hardware-wallet seed, import a WIF private key, or recover an old wallet.dat using current software.

A seed phrase may recover transparent ZEC and, in later wallets, Sapling ZEC.

(For Sprout a seed phrase alone is not a substitute for an old zcashd wallet.dat. Sprout requires the original Sprout spending key, which may be in an old wallet.dat or preserved separately as an exported, written-down or printed SK... key. Keep the original wallet.dat because the v4.7.0 recovery phrase does not cover every older or imported key.)

So, Sprout-era does not always mean Sprout.

BUT… an old wallet.dat or wallet export from 2016-2018 may contain transparent ZEC, Sprout ZEC, or both. Sprout addresses start with zc... and Sprout spending keys with SK.... Check what it actually controls before Sprout is put on ice. (See links above.)

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