Like many things in life, the reality isn't always as cut and dry as the words might lead you to believe. Take the title of this post for example. Yes, some people are losing access to their WAX Cloud Wallets, and yes Google is partly to blame for that. If you spend a bit of time on the WAX subReddit though, you would think Google is actively stealing people's funds and that just isn't the case.
You see, WAX Cloud Wallet has this cool feature where you can create and login to your wallet using a Google or other social media account. It's actually a great way to make crypto more accessible to the masses, but it obviously comes with its own share of issues.
I personally login to one of my wallets this way, but I use an active Google account that has two factor authentication enabled on it.
What's happening in many cases is people created a separate Google account just to login to their WAX Cloud Wallet. Since they don't use that account for anything else, Google has taken it upon themselves to consider it a dormant account and as such they are disabling/deleting the accounts.
As you can imagine, this is making the WAX Cloud Wallet for those people including their tokens and NFTs inaccessible.
If you have a WAX Cloud Wallet account and you use an active Google account, you are probably okay, but I encourage you to follow the steps below to ensure you never lose access to it because of something Google decides to do.
The first thing you are going to want to do it visit and download the Anchor wallet on a PC. I think they do have a mobile version of the wallet, but I am not sure it is supported and I really don't use it that much. As much as we hate to admit it these days, some things just look/work better on a PC.
Once you have Anchor Wallet downloaded and installed, it will have you create a password for it. It might try to force you to import an account. If you can just skip that part for now.
What you want is a screen that looks something like the one you see above. Notice that just to the right of the word "Anchor" in the upper left hand corner is a spot where you can pick what network you are connected to. Make sure you choose WAX and not EOS or TELOS or one of the other ones.
Then you are going to want to navigate to the Tools menu on the left side of the screen.
From there choose the "manage keys" option.
You should see a screen that looks something like the one above. Notice the "Generate Key Pairs" button? That is where we are heading next.
It will bring up another pop up with another button that says "Generate Key Pair (x2)". Go ahead and click that.
These are the two key pairs that you are going to end up adding to WAX Cloud Wallet. One is going to be your "Owner Key" and the other is going to be your "Active Key".
Do whatever you have to do to make a record of both the public and private key on this screen. If you lose this you really could lose access to your WAX account!
Do you have those four keys (owner public and private, active public and private) copied, pasted, written down, photographed, and stored in a safe place?
Okay good.
Back in your WAX Cloud Wallet browser window you are going to want to click on the "Settings" menu on the left hand side of the screen. From there you will choose "Account Claiming".
At this point it is up to you, whether you want to do a "soft claim" or a "hard claim". Personally, I picked soft claim because there are still some dapps out there that don't work with the Anchor wallet. It kind of gives you the best of both worlds.
When you click "soft claim", it will bring up a window that asks you for those keys that you should have recorded before. If you didn't, it's not too late for you to go back and do that. You've gotta do it this time though because after this you are out of luck if you don't have a record of those keys.
Grab the first "public key" and paste that into the "owner key" section. Then do the same for the second public key and the "active key" section.
Double check your work and then check the verify box and choose to sign the transaction. If you have two factor authentication enabled on your WAX Cloud Wallet (you do right?), it should bring up a screen asking you for your authenticator code, plus a code from the Google email address you have tied to the account.
Enter those, process the transaction and then you should see a screen that gives you the option to click "Done".
That's it!
Now, as a backup, go back to your Anchor wallet, choose to import an account, and then grab the private active key from wherever you saved it. Put that key in and it should import your WAX Cloud Wallet into Anchor. You can now sign transactions with Anchor with your WAX Cloud Wallet account just like you would from the web interface.
You can also import your Owner key if you want, but most transactions only need your active key.
Remember! "Not Your Keys, Not Your Crypto" is a saying for a reason. Taking these steps will ensure you never (at least because of Google) lose access to your WAX tokens and NFTs.
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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or 