I’m creating this thread on behalf of Scott Summers, who’s been posting about ICP for years on X and YouTube, but he’s new to this dev forum so he didn’t have the account trust level to create a thread on his own yet.
It seems he’s having some trouble controlling his NNS neuron with his ledger after resetting his ledger with the seed words.
He says his ledger ICP app is up to date and everything, but when he tries to manage his neuron on the NNS frontend is says it was expecting an account starting with “a03d2…” but it got a unexpected wallet that starts with “bd29aa…”.
What’s strange is that when he’s using his ledger through a different interface it displays the correct address “a03d2…” but it says there’s no neurons controlled by that account.
I get the feeling that this is some type of frontend error or something. I’ll let Scott comment on this thread will screenshots and other details, but I hear there’s like $100k worth of ICP on the line so it would be great if DFINITY or some of the community members may be able to help him out!
So here’s the issue I figured it out. My seed phrase for my ledger is wrong. So ultimately it’s gone. But someone at dfinity told me I could have a proposal made in the NNS to have my neuron transferred to a new neuron without my ledger or transferred to a new Internet identity. I beg for help my life is on the line rn.
Hey Scott! Sorry to hear that you are having issues accessing your neuron.
There is no mechanism built into the NNS to change the controller of a neuron. Yet, as all canisters (including the governance canister, which holds the neurons) can be upgraded through NNS proposals, it is technically possible to upgrade the governance canister to a version of the code that replaces the controller for a specific neuron.
In a case early after launch, a neuron holder claimed to have lost access to their II through theft. The neuron holder then made a motion proposal explaining their case. The proposal ultimately failed; had it been successful, implementing the proposal’s intent would have meant upgrading the II canister, replacing the public keys associated with that neuron holder’s II. This is why I see the case as somewhat comparable to what you describe.
So one possibility for you to move ahead could be a motion proposal that proposes some kind of recovery action. I would personally advice not to just rush ahead on this, but consider at least the following three aspects:
The legitimacy of your claim may be difficult to assess by the NNS participants voting on the proposal. What independently verifiable evidence do you have for your claims? Some things that may be relevant are: proposals you may have made with the neuron, transaction history of the neuron or the associated principal, public claims on social media, and so forth.
While people in ICP may be less of “not your keys, not your crypto” maximalists than at some other places, the decision to possibly change the ownership of assets without a signature of the holder keys is one that no one will take lightly. This underlines the importance of the previous point.
The exact recovery action you propose may have an impact on how people vote. Assigning the controllership to a new, entirely fresh principal may be less palatable for voters than assigning it to a principal that is already a hotkey on the neuron. This is just one first idea, maybe there are other ways of making the change less intrusive while still achieving your goals at least to some extent.
Unfortunately if you don’t remember the words and cannot restore the device there is no way to re-gain access to the neurons that are controlled by it.
Manage to solve it, Ledger integration is still just really clunky. On a Mac (might be the same on other platforms), needed to have the correct Ledger connected with the ICP app open BEFORE logging into NNS.
We found an edge case in the NNS front-end dapp that explains this behavior, which we could trigger by using multiple Ledger devices during the same session. The error will be fixed in the subsequent release of the front end, until then: if you experience this error, just log out and log in again (to clear a certain cache), and things will be fine.
