Possible wallet corruption after force quit during CoinJoin – missing balances in two wallets

[gagaga342]

Hello,

I am trying to understand whether I am dealing with wallet corruption, a recovery issue, or expected CoinJoin behavior.

Environment:

• Wasabi Wallet on macOS
• Two separate wallets were affected
• Both wallets were fully synchronized and showed correct balances before the incident
• CoinJoin was active

What happened

At some point Wasabi was force-closed while CoinJoin activity was ongoing.

Before the force quit:

• both wallets displayed the expected balances;
• transaction history looked normal;
• CoinJoin history was present.

After restarting Wasabi:

• both wallets lost part of their recent transaction history;
• balances became significantly lower than before;
• some CoinJoin transactions are still visible, but many expected outputs appear to be missing;
• wallet recovery does not restore the missing balance.

The fact that two different wallets were affected at approximately the same time makes me suspect database/index corruption rather than a normal CoinJoin spend.

Recovery attempts

• wallet recovery from the original recovery phrase;
• verified the correct BIP39 passphrase;
• full wallet synchronization;
• increased Gap Limit up to 3000;
• created a recovered wallet and let it fully synchronize.

The recovered wallet did not find the missing balance.

Log messages

The logs repeatedly contain messages like:

"The wallet is not fully synchronized or corrupted."

and

"is spent according to the backend. The wallet is not fully synchronized or corrupted."

Examples:

98b8d01e3698aae7f681d24cb462779f02eecccf5d60d4fbcb83a03bdfe31288

ceeb3c821be88943d913fcb532d89e94a43342c28c2e373815819d809200556f

dc7e1429fc2b47dad6d969257a043b65f2dd02e6035553b01b30f5e7220d8476

ecf227bf186b3568ea7ccdedb4bbb4fd061ccc18858feaaa3a7d0ea434b1e6be

Strange CoinJoin fee values

Several CoinJoin entries display extremely large fee values in the UI:

• about 0.089 BTC
• about 0.098 BTC
• about 0.011 BTC

These values appear inconsistent with normal CoinJoin fees and may indicate that some wallet-owned outputs are not being recognized correctly.

Example transaction:

CoinJoin:
9c86a123a21d188b5a9181f4254d7fe38c6c60290933b2cc3374d2f30fb36ea5

Related transaction:
5c1c68058b325f502d3df05736fd9a3f5fb9db03ebf908ff16368f4749b1533d

Additional observations

Before the incident both wallets showed substantially higher balances.

After the restart:

• balances dropped;
• recent transactions disappeared;
• recovered wallets could not rediscover the missing funds even with a gap limit of 3000.

I still have wallet files, logs, screenshots and transaction IDs available if additional investigation is needed.

Could the wallet have lost ownership information for CoinJoin outputs after the force quit?

Thank you.

[Kruwed]

Thanks for the detailed report. What version of Wasabi Wallet are you using? (Click the "About Wasabi" menu item in Wasabi's advanced search bar)

[Carti-it]

Hi, very sorry that you experience this issue.

First, please make sure that you back up your profile somewhere else (on a flash disk, to another disk location). This should help you avoid additional damage and gives you ability to "try again" various options. Your profile should be stored in: ~/.walletwasabi

I'm not exactly what your priority is right now. I guess you want to access your funds first, is that correct? Would it be an option to try to recover your wallet in a different wallet using BIP39 words? I guess that Bitcoin Core, a mobile wallet like Electrum or any other wallet can show you "what happened" (to get additional insights). I say this mostly because at the moment it appears that something is really wrong with your current profile.

An alternative might be that you would try to run your Wasabi Wallet with --datadir=<some temporary folder> parameter and then try to import your wallet there (to work with a clean slate and not risk any additional corruption) from ~/.walletwasabi/Client/Wallets.

[Carti-it]

Could the wallet have lost ownership information for CoinJoin outputs after the force quit?

It should not be the case. I believe.

[gagaga342]

I already tried restoring one of the affected wallets from the seed phrase in Wasabi with a gap limit around 3000, but the missing balance still did not appear. Do you mean restoring it in a completely clean Wasabi data directory, or testing the seed in a different wallet such as Electrum?

[Carti-it]

My best guess is that your blockchain data is corrupted somehow.

1. I would create a new directory ~/wasabi-recovery
2. I would start wasabi with --data="$HOME/wasabi-recovery and attempt to recover using BIP39 words

and let it sync. It might take a lot of time but it should work.

[Kruwed]

@gagaga342 make sure that https://api.wasabiwallet.io/ is set as your indexer in the connections tab:

I guess that Bitcoin Core, a mobile wallet like Electrum or any other wallet can show you "what happened" (to get additional insights).

Core does not support BIP39 and Electrum does not support Taproot, so neither will be useful for recovery.

[Carti-it]

Log messages

The logs repeatedly contain messages like:

"The wallet is not fully synchronized or corrupted."

and

"is spent according to the backend. The wallet is not fully synchronized or corrupted."

I can see the message here:

WalletWasabi/WalletWasabi/WabiSabi/Client/CoinJoin/Client/CoinJoinClient.cs

Line 459 in 85edce6

roundState.LogInfo($"{coin.Coin.Outpoint} is spent according to the backend. The wallet is not fully synchronized or corrupted.");

That can suggest that your wallet does not know about newer blocks/transactions.

Could you share what chain tip your wallet reports? It's in the right bottom corner:

[gagaga342]

The chain tip reported by Wasabi is 952225.

Also, before the unexpected shutdown both affected wallets were showing the correct balance and transaction history. The issue only appeared after restarting Wasabi.

Other wallets that were not involved in CoinJoin around that time still show the correct balance.

I also recovered the wallet from the BIP39 seed in Sparrow and currently see only about 2.8M sats there, while I expected a significantly higher balance.

[gagaga342]

Update:

I recovered both affected wallets in Sparrow using the same BIP39 seed words and passphrases. The expected funds were found, so it appears the coins are still there and the seeds are correct.

At this point, would it be reasonable to completely remove my current Wasabi data directory, install a fresh copy of Wasabi, and recover the wallets again from the seed words?

Or would you recommend a different recovery procedure to avoid losing information that could help diagnose the issue?

[Kruwed]

I recovered both affected wallets in Sparrow using the same BIP39 seed words and passphrases. The expected funds were found, so it appears the coins are still there and the seeds are correct.

Wasabi uses both Segwitv0 (m/84'/0'/0') and Taproot (m/86'/0'/0') addresses, make sure you recover both halves of your wallet.

[Carti-it]

At this point, would it be reasonable to completely remove my current Wasabi data directory, install a fresh copy of Wasabi, and recover the wallets again from the seed words?

I believe that this approach would lead to losing your transaction labels. If this is acceptable, I believe it's reasonable way. Be sure to always backup the data directory upfront.

[lontivero]

The message is spent according to the backend. The wallet is not fully synchronized or corrupted. Means that your wallet tried to participate in coinjoins with coins that were already spent, something that should never happen except in cases where the wallet is not fully synchronized or it is somehow corrupted. I would suggest to make a backup of your wallet files, delete the wasabi data directory and make a full recovery.

[lontivero]

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