What happens if I lose my phone?
Why a lost phone is not a lost balance, and how your wallet moves to a new device.
Losing a phone is stressful enough without wondering if your savings went with it. They didn't. Your balance is safe, whoever has the phone can't spend it, and your recovery key brings your wallet back on a new device. This page explains how each of those works.
Your balance was never on the phone
Your digital dollars live on a public network, recorded on a ledger that thousands of computers keep in sync. The phone is just your window into that ledger. Losing it is like losing your online banking app, not like losing cash. What is a cryptocurrency wallet? covers this in more depth.
What a thief is actually holding
The app starts locked, and only your PIN or biometrics get past that screen. Moving money always takes a fresh PIN or biometric confirmation on top of that, every single time, so a payment can never go out without you.
The spending key itself sits sealed in the phone's secure storage, tied to that one device. It's excluded even from the phone's own backups, so it can't be copied out, synced somewhere, or carried over by cloning the phone.
The exception is your PIN. Someone who has your phone and knows your PIN can spend your money, the same way someone with your card and its code can. Keep the PIN to yourself, and if you think someone has it, change it.
Getting back in on a new phone
This is the moment your recovery key exists for. On the new phone, you sign in and open your recovery backup, the encrypted file you saved when you set up your account. Your recovery password unlocks it right on the device, and the wallet uses it to switch over.
The switch works like changing the locks rather than copying the old key. The new phone creates a brand-new spending key for itself, and your recovery key authorizes the network to accept the new key in place of the old one. From the moment that's confirmed, the old phone is cut off completely. Even if someone unlocks it later, its key no longer moves anything.
Your recovery key itself doesn't change in the process. The same backup file and password stay valid, ready for the next new phone. The steps live in Restore your wallet, and The two-key model explains why the recovery key can do this.
The part to think about today
Everything above rests on one thing existing when you need it, your recovery backup and its password. Without them, a lost phone does become a lost wallet, and nobody can rebuild the backup for you, not even MozaikPay. A good moment to check where yours lives is before the phone goes missing, not after.