Pulse wallet is shutting down: move your funds before August 21

Pulse posted a shutdown notice (pinned on their X account). Three things in it matter: the service is being discontinued for financial reasons; after August 21, 2026 you will no longer be able to access your wallet through the app; their support team is still answering withdrawal questions until then.

Quick disclosure before anything else: you’re reading this on the blog of a passkey wallet, so we have obvious skin in this game. For that reason, this post recommends other people’s products and doesn’t pitch ours. I keep notes on wallet shutdowns, and Pulse’s case has one detail I think people are underestimating, so I cleaned those notes up into this post. Every claim has a link; if I got something wrong, tell me and I’ll fix it.

Why this shutdown is different from most

When Leap Wallet shut down in May, the official guidance was: export your seed phrase, import it into Keplr or MetaMask, done. Same addresses, same assets, nothing moves on-chain. That’s how seed phrase wallets die: the account is the phrase, every wallet app understands it, so a shutdown is close to a non-event for users.

Pulse is a passkey wallet with no seed phrase. Its notice says only “transfer all assets to another wallet that you control”, and as of August 8 neither the announcement nor the website mentions any way to export keys. If that doesn’t change, every asset you hold needs an actual on-chain transfer out, and the only interface for making those transfers is the app that stops working on August 21.

The precedent for this architecture is not reassuring. When Coinbase retired the Web3 wallet built into its main app last year (MPC-based, also no exportable seed), Forbes covered users who missed the migration window, got stuck in the official migration tool, and in some cases ended up with discounted compensation instead of their assets.

So the entire advice of this post compresses to one sentence: don’t let this run to the last few days.

The checklist

1. Open Pulse and write down every asset: token, amount, and which network it’s on. If you can’t tell the network, ask support rather than guessing.
2. Pick a destination wallet (next section) and get a receiving address.
3. Send a small test amount first, say 5 USDC. Confirm it arrives, then move the rest.
4. Check the network on every transfer. USDT exists on many chains, and transfers sent over the wrong one are usually unrecoverable.
5. When done, reconcile the balances in your new wallet against the list from step 1.

Leave buffer time. Support will be overloaded in the final days, and chains occasionally congest.

Where to go

There’s no single right answer, so here are the options with their costs, and you can match them to your situation.

A hardware wallet. Entry-level Ledger is around $44, Trezor Safe 3 is $59. Makes sense for larger amounts. The cost: you’re learning the seed phrase routine, and you’re waiting for shipping, which is another reason not to procrastinate.

A mainstream software wallet (MetaMask, Rabby, Trust, etc.). Free, usable in minutes. The cost: you’re back to writing down and guarding 12 words, which is probably the thing you picked Pulse to avoid.

An exchange. For small stablecoin balances, if you genuinely don’t want to deal with any of this, it’s an honest option. Just be clear that you’re trading “the company shut down” risk for “someone else holds my money” risk, not eliminating risk.

Another passkey wallet. The category is bigger than Pulse. Before picking one (including ours — this is the part where you should trust us least), I’d figure out one thing: if this company also shuts down, can my account still be reached from software they don’t control? That question deserves its own post, so I wrote one that argues entirely from public cases.

While you’re at it: how to pick a wallet

By my notes, Pulse is the sixth consumer wallet to shut down this year, after Family, Magic Eden Wallet, Leap, HaHa, and Ctrl. The list will probably keep growing, so next time you choose a wallet, three questions are worth asking first:

If this company disappears, what specific software do I use to get my assets back? It only counts as an answer if you can name it (“import my seed into MetaMask” counts).

Is the account a standard that multiple apps understand, or a custom implementation only this one app recognizes?

Is the backend open source? Open source doesn’t mean the product is good. It means the product can outlive the company.

That’s all. The deadline is August 21.