Online wallets like Hive come and go, sometimes leaving your Litecoin stranded. Here are some approaches to recovering and transferring your LTC.

If you’re interested in a crypto-currency lik Litecoin but don’t want to download the client and entire LTC blockchain online wallets are a popular alternative for storing your digital currency.

The problem is that online wallets come and go. Not that long ago the Hive online wallet, which had once looked to be one of the most promising, went offline. And, even worse, many (maybe most) users weren’t notified. They didn’t find out until they went to the Hive site, saw that it was down…. and then often assumed that their Litecoin was gone forever.

The good news is that the Litecoin can be recovered, the bad news is that it’s a little complicated and takes a little work.

The basic idea is that you start with your twelve word passphrase. You absolutely need that, but you also needed it to get into the Hive wallet so hopefully you wrote it down somewhere.

From that you use an online tool to generate what are usually referred to as the public and private keys that can be derived from it.

You then use an online block explorer (so you don’t need to download the entire Litecoin blockchain) to check which of those keys have LTC balances.

Then, finally, you important those balances into a new LiteVault Litecoin wallet.

These basic steps have been mentioned a lot on the internet, but it’s a lot of steps, and involves some tools and sites most people are likely not familiar with.

This article makes the process of recovering Litecoin much more approachable, documenting the procedure step-by-step with lots of screen shots to help.