Deprecating legacy `t` addresses on Mainnet Glif

Accessing legacy addresses through Glif

On November 1st 2021, we'll change the way you access your legacy Filecoin addresses on the Glif Wallet and Multisig. We strongly encourage you to move funds and multisig signing accounts to the normal, supported addresses as soon as possible.



Before November 1st 2021, users could access their legacy addresses by clicking the “Use t addresses” button on the Glif Wallet home page:



Today, the account selection view allows you to create a new Filecoin address, using the legacy format.





Example

Let's say you used to use the Glif Wallet with a t address. As a user, when you visited https://wallet.glif.io, you probably changed the setting on the Wallet home page to “Use t addresses", and then selected a login option.



Next, you were probably presented with the old account selector interface, that looks like the screenshot below:





To recover any of your accounts from the account selection interface...

• In the bottom right hand card, select “Legacy address”. You will know it is selected if it has a green background.

• Type in the “account index” that corresponds to the account you wish to recover. For example, if you used to select the 0th t address account from the account selection, you should type in 0 to the account index field.

• Click "Create".





You'll notice when I click “Create” using a legacy address, and account index of 0, I get the same exact address that I had in the old version of the account selection view.



Context for the change

Before Filecoin Mainnet launch in October of 2020, we added support for special testnet addresses. One feature of these testnet addresses was the ability to derive a different account from the same seed phrase - depending on your network. So for the seed phrase hello truck apple ...etc, I would get completely different t addresses and f addresses. This ensured no collisions between testnet and mainnet.



However, this plan ended up causing confusion for folks after mainnet launch, since the final testnet Filecoin blockchain transformed into the mainnet chain. We weren't expecting this to happen at the beginning.



We've since deprecated the “special” testnet addresses. We are now referring to these as "Legacy", but we will continue to support them for the foreseeable future.



Moving forward, any time Glif is connected to Mainnet, you will see addresses that begin with the letter f . Any time Glif is connected to a testnet, you will see addresses that begin with the letter t . However, these addresses are now only cosmetic - your seed phrase will produce the same addresses on testnet and mainnet.