Crypto Wallet Recovery FAQ
Straight answers about what can and cannot be recovered, why the limits exist, and how to avoid making a recoverable case unrecoverable.
Feasibility
Can you guarantee recovery?
No. Recovery may be possible depending on what information remains, and each case requires individual assessment. Any provider advertising guaranteed recovery or a fixed success rate is misrepresenting the mathematics involved.
What is the single biggest factor in feasibility?
How much of the missing credential you can still describe. A password you partly remember and a seed missing one word are both small searches. Total loss with no fragment is not a search at all.
Can a completely lost 12- or 24-word phrase be recovered?
No. If no words, no wallet file, no backup and no device data survive, there is nothing to reconstruct from and no computational approach that helps.
How long does recovery take?
Classifying a case is quick. The work itself scales with the candidate space, from minutes for a trivially constrained search to a sustained computational effort for a large one.
Passwords and seeds
My wallet says the password is wrong but I am sure it is right.
Check keyboard layout, language settings, caps lock and any invisible characters copied from a notes app. Layout changes between machines are a frequent cause, especially for symbols.
My seed phrase is rejected as invalid.
That is a checksum failure, usually caused by one misread or misspelled word. It is among the more tractable cases because the checksum itself narrows the candidates.
The phrase works but the wallet is empty.
Check the derivation path, the account index, the address type and whether a passphrase was ever set. All four produce an empty-looking but perfectly valid wallet.
Can a seed phrase be derived from my wallet address?
No. The derivation is one-way by cryptographic design. Anyone claiming otherwise is running a scam.
Files, devices and old wallets
Can an old wallet.dat file still be opened?
Usually yes if the file is intact; the obstacle is normally the passphrase rather than the format. Damaged files may still yield key material through low-level parsing.
My hardware wallet is broken. Are the coins lost?
Not if the recovery phrase exists. The device is an interface; the phrase is the wallet and can be restored on a new compatible device.
I found an old hard drive. What should I do first?
Image it before doing anything else and work only from the copy. Do not boot from it and do not run repair utilities on it.
Do coins expire if untouched for years?
No. Unspent outputs remain valid indefinitely. Only access degrades, never the coins themselves.
Scope and safety
Do you recover stolen or scammed cryptocurrency?
No. This service is limited to owners locked out of their own wallets. We do not trace stolen funds, reverse transactions, or recover coins sent to a wrong address.
Should I send my seed phrase through this form?
Never. No legitimate assessment requires it. Anyone requesting a full phrase, private key or password is attempting theft.
Someone messaged me offering to recover my wallet. Is that safe?
Treat unsolicited recovery offers as fraudulent by default, particularly after posting publicly about lost access. Recovery scams specifically target people who have already lost something.
What should I do immediately after regaining access?
Move the funds to a newly generated wallet, ideally on a hardware device, back up the new phrase offline, and verify the backup with a small test transaction.
Go deeper
Not sure whether your case is recoverable?
Describe the wallet, what happened and what information you still have. You will get an honest assessment of whether recovery is technically feasible — without sending any secret credentials.
Assess My Recovery Case