Imagine using RINO for months when suddenly, out of the blue, the website seemingly vanishes. Or maybe it is up, but RINO is not functional due to some server misconfiguration issue or some other network infrastructure shenanigans. As it turns out, in any of these circumstances, your funds are safe and fully accessible by you without any help from RINO.

All you need is the “Wallet Recovery Document”. This document is nicely self-contained: it contains not only the cryptographic keys of your wallet, but also the specific instructions you have to follow to recover your wallet.

The following explanation is somewhat technical and goes a bit further: it will guide you step by step through the process of sweeping all the funds present in a RINO wallet to another external wallet. All that matters really is that at the end of this process, you will have your funds sent wherever you want completely outside of RINO, free to do with them as you please.

Download the official Monero software

Firstly, download the latest version of the Monero command line software for your particular operating system:

• https://www.getmonero.org/downloads/#cli

Secondly, verify the digital signature of the archive you have downloaded by following these instructions:

• https://www.getmonero.org/resources/user-guides/verification-windows-beginner.html

After you have verified the authenticity of the archive, extract the contents to a folder of your choice. And then open a terminal window. In Windows, right-click the Start button and select “Windows Terminal”. In MacOS, open Spotlight Search prompt by tapping and holding Command + Space. Type “terminal” and hit Enter. For most Linux distros, pressing Ctrl + Alt + t should bring up a terminal window.

Next, change directories to the location of the folder where you extracted the files of the archive. In the terminal, type cd, hit space, and drag and drop the folder directly into the terminal window. This will give you the full location of the folder. Hit Enter. You can see all the files in the directory by typing dir in Windows or ls in MacOS/Linux.

The fully “self-sovereign” way to interact with Monero is to download the entire Monero blockchain, which can take a few hours to a day, depending on the specs of your computer and internet connection. As of July 2023, the size of the full Monero blockchain is about 120 GBs. You can save disk space by pruning the blockchain by running monerod application with the --prune-blockchain option. Type ./monerod --prune-blockchain (or in Windows, monerod.exe --prune-blockchain) and hit Enter. If you do not want to bother downloading the entire blockchain, you can use some publicly accessible Monero RPC nodes instead; check out https://monerodocs.org/interacting/monero-wallet-cli-reference/#full-node-connection for available wallet options and https://monero.fail for a list of public nodes.

Create the required wallets

Once syncing to the network is complete, open a new tab in the terminal window (Command + t or Ctrl + t) and run the wallet recovery process by typing ./monero-wallet-cli --restore-multisig-wallet (or monero-wallet-cli.exe --restore-multisig-wallet) and hit Enter.

Type a wallet name for the first wallet (e.g. “wallet-1”). Depending on your Monero version, it is possible you see warning messages stating multisig is disabled and that the feature is experimental. In this case, you can type y to continue.

Recovering your RINO wallet funds, which are currently in a multisig-based wallet, requires first to generate two basic wallets. You will need the seed of these two basic wallets, they are in your “Wallet Recovery Document”, on page 3. You can just copy the wallet seed string. These strings should not contain line breaks; if you have line breaks in your paste due to your PDF viewer, remove them in a text editor. Paste the no-line-break string in the terminal window. Hit Enter.

You will be asked to enter a seed offset passphrase. There is none, so hit Enter. In the next line of questions, you will be asked to enter a new password and confirm the password. You will be prompted to enter a restore height. If you know roughly which block was your first transaction, enter that number otherwise type 0 to scan the whole blockchain from the genesis block and hit Enter. And finally, you will be asked if you would like to enable background mining. Type “n” and hit Enter.

After the wallet is done scanning, open a new tab in the terminal window (Command + t or Ctrl + t) and you will need to repeat the above process for the second basic wallet (“wallet-2”) using the seed string in page 4 of the "Wallet Recovery Document".

Spend your funds

Once you are all set with "wallet-1" and "wallet-2", you can now sweep out all your funds in another wallet in your control (It is up to you what it actually is, let’s call this “wallet-3” for simplicity).

Go to the "wallet-1" tab, type: export_multisig_info wallet-1-info.

Go back to "wallet-2" tab, type: export_multisig_info wallet-2-info.

Go to "wallet-1" tab, type: import_multisig_info wallet-2-info.

And then go to "wallet-2" tab, type: import_multisig_info wallet-1-info.

Now you can transfer funds from the multisig wallet to another wallet address, staying in in the "wallet-2" tab, type: sweep_all ADDRESS ("wallet-3"’s address) and confirm the transfer. This will not execute the actual transaction just yet. The wallet will create a file named “multisig_monero_tx” containing a partially signed transaction.

Go to "wallet-1" tab, type: sign_multisig multisig_monero_tx and then type: submit_multisig multisig_monero_tx to broadcast the transaction on the network.

After a few minutes, the funds will appear in "wallet-3". Congratulations, you have recovered your funds without RINO taking part in the process.