After creating this thread and getting to talk to a moderator who has told me that the ‘restore your wallet using a recovery phrase’ feature is not supported anymore and that lost funds apparently will not be refunded anymore (around 300 BAT in my case) even though they have been in the future, like in this case, I’d have some last questions regarding this mess and a few requests that could save lots of users trouble in the future…
Why is the ‘restore your wallet with a recovery phrase’ still being displayed in the Brave browser today even though its “not supported anymore”?
(My devices are on Windows 10, with Brave Version 1.25.70)
Don’t you think that it would only be fair to refund user’s BAT if this option is still visible today and obviously misleading people? I trusted Brave that if the option to restore is being displayed, it works and is being supported.
Are old user balances being stored in some kind of database or was all data from the “previous rewards wallet system” permanently deleted? If they are still stored somewhere, why are refunds not possible anymore, especially since this isn’t our fault?
I see people losing their BAT because they think they can recover it with the phrase every day on here. I’d wish that you would spread awareness regarding this breaking change, delete the feature from the Brave Browser UI and delete old content from the official Brave team (such as the Youtube Channel) that still claims one could restore the rewards wallet using a recovery phrase.
And ofc. I’d be glad If I could get a refund of the BAT that I’ve earned since 2019 and lost because of Brave’s misleading UI…
Good question. Hope the devs will correct this soon.
No, user balances are stored only on that user’s device. If the device is reset, lost, etc., there is no way for anyone at Brave to know what the previous balance was.
Because of #3, Brave would have to take users’ word for the amount they lost, and there are clearly FAR too many scam artists out there who would take advantage of the good graces of the Brave staff.
Thanks for the answers @rosiecar.
But if user balances were never stored in any database, then how did this whole process of restoring wallets with a phrase work (in the past)? I mean, the rewards wallet is custodial, there is no blockchain involved, so all the data had/has to be stored somewhere, else there would have never been an option to restore the wallet by using a phrase.
I’m just wondering why/how users got refunded after reporting this issue in multiple threads on the forum, and why refunds out of a sudden are not possible anymore.
It’s also just unacceptable that this feature still hasn’t been removed after around 1 year of users reporting losing their funds this way. No one seems to be taking responsibility for this and users experiencing this issue seem to be ignored from what I’ve seen the past few days.
I’ve just read Brave’s privacy policy and it seems like the history of all BAT earning seems to be stored in a database:
If you switch on Brave Rewards you are assigned a “wallet” identifier by Uphold, our payments partner. We record this identifier on servers operated by Amazon and Heroku (a Salesforce company) in the United States
Each time Brave sends users a monthly gift of BAT it makes a record of their IP addresses that can be analysed to safeguard against fraud. Brave checks to see whether we are currently offering tokens to Brave users. This request includes the identifier of your unique Rewards wallet…
If it makes a “record of their IP address(es)”, that “includes the identifier of [the] unique Rewards wallet”, which I can prove that I have access to by restoring my wallet and going to brave://rewards-internals/.
So from a technical perspective, it seems to be possible to restore the exact amount of BAT that I had. It’s just that sadly no one is willing to deal with it…
I will have to defer to Brave staff on that question. I started using Brave after the restore option was no longer available, and I have always been told it wasn’t available. This is what my Brave Rewards shows:
If you’d like to secure all of your funds in the case of clean installing the browser or switching to a new device, and have other benefits such as adding, withdrawing and transferring funds, we recommend connecting to a verified Uphold wallet.
That tells me that the only way to preserve my Brave Rewards in the event of a reinstall or device change is to link my Brave wallet to an Uphold wallet and transfer the BAT to Uphold. Some time ago, I asked specifically about backing up and restoring my Brave rewards and was told it’s no longer available.
@steeven@Mattches@tmancey Can you shed any further light? If in fact the backup/restore option is no longer available, then max37 and the others posting about this recently have a legitimate complaint, and all references to the option need to be removed from both the Brave Rewards settings and all of the documentation.
Sorry for being spammy, but I’d at least like to get a moderator’s take on this whole situation before leaving, especially on why refunds are not possible out of a sudden even though our rewards history seems to be trackable.
This problem could be prevented if this feature finally gets removed but we’re all apparently keep getting ignored and people in the future will continue losing their funds. This issue is being mentioned daily on here which shows that there is 0 awareness.