MultiBit wallet files: locations, formats, backups, and derivation paths

MultiBit was one of the most popular desktop Bitcoin wallets of the 2011–2016 era, and it has been abandoned software since 2017 — no official downloads, no support, and installers floating around the web that you should not trust. If you've found an old MultiBit wallet or backup and want your coins, this reference covers what every file is, where it lives, and how to get the keys out. It condenses what we've learned recovering MultiBit wallets for clients — see the MultiBit wallet recovery service if you'd rather have it done for you.

There were two entirely different products under the MultiBit name, and the first thing to do is work out which one you have:

• MultiBit Classic (2011–2015) — non-HD; a bag of individual private keys in a .wallet file
• MultiBit HD (2014–2017) — HD wallet; everything derives from a 12-word seed phrase, stored encrypted as mbhd.wallet.aes

The quickest tell is the filenames: anything starting with mbhd. is MultiBit HD, and a bare <name>.wallet is Classic.

Can MultiBit still be opened in 2026?

Short answer: the application is dead, but your coins are not.

MultiBit HD's backend servers were shut down years ago, so even if you install the old app it can't reliably sync with the Bitcoin network, and it may hang, show a wrong balance, or refuse to send. MultiBit Classic is worse off still. So "can MultiBit still be opened" is the wrong question. You should not be trying to run MultiBit at all. What you want is to take the keys or seed out of the MultiBit files and into modern, maintained software like Electrum.

The good news is that this works regardless of whether the app runs, because everything you need is in the files on disk. Those files don't expire. A .wallet, a .key export, an mbhd.wallet.aes, or your 12-word seed will still recover your Bitcoin in 2026 exactly as they would have in 2016. The rest of this page is how to find and use them.

MultiBit Classic: file locations and formats

Classic's default data directory is:

Classic also let you save wallets anywhere, so if the default folder is empty, search every old drive, backup disk, and cloud folder for *.wallet and *.key files before concluding anything is lost.

The files that matter:

The -data folder is what saves most Classic recoveries. Inside <walletname>-data/ you'll find:

• key-backup/ — timestamped .key snapshots taken automatically whenever you added keys
• wallet-backup/ and rolling-backup/ — timestamped copies of the .wallet file

So even a corrupt or deleted main wallet is frequently recoverable from its own -data folder. Check there before anything else.

MultiBit HD: file locations and formats

MultiBit HD keeps everything under:

Each wallet lives in a folder named mbhd- followed by a long letter-number string. Inside:

MultiBit HD wallets are protected by a password (needed to decrypt mbhd.wallet.aes) and derived from a 12-word seed phrase shown at wallet creation. If you have the 12 words, you don't need any files at all.

MultiBit file extensions, decoded

People search for the exact extension they're staring at, so here is every MultiBit file format in one place:

If you have a .wallet.aes.zip (sometimes written zip.aes) and nothing else, that's fine: it's a full encrypted copy of the wallet. Unzip it to get the mbhd.wallet.aes inside, then treat it like any other HD wallet file.

The MultiBit HD derivation path (restoring the seed in Electrum)

This is the detail that trips everyone up: MultiBit HD did not use the BIP44 path modern wallets expect. It derived addresses under m/0' (first BIP32 account, receive chain m/0'/0, change chain m/0'/1).

To restore a MultiBit HD seed in Electrum:

1. File → New/Restore → I already have a seed
2. Enter the 12 words, click Options → BIP39 seed
3. When asked for the derivation path, choose legacy (p2pkh) and enter m/0'

If you restore with the default BIP44 path (m/44'/0'/0'), you'll see an empty wallet and conclude your coins are gone — they aren't; the wallet is just looking in the wrong place. An empty-but-should-be-full restore is a derivation-path problem until proven otherwise. (The same trick recovers seeds from other bitcoinj-era wallets that used m/0'.)

Old MultiBit wallets (2013–2014) and missing change addresses

The oldest MultiBit Classic wallets — 2013 and 2014 vintage, from the early Bitcoin days — are the ones most likely to hand you a short balance after a sweep, and it's almost always the same cause: change addresses.

MultiBit Classic was not an HD wallet. In most versions it sent change back to your own existing addresses rather than to hidden change addresses, which is why sweeping the keys from a .key export normally captures the full balance. But two things can leave coins behind:

• Later keys aren't in an early export. If you exported keys once in 2013 and kept using the wallet, change and new receive addresses generated afterward won't be in that old .key file. A more recent automatic key-backup/ snapshot usually contains them. Always sweep from the latest backup you can find, not the first.
• HD change on the internal chain. For MultiBit HD, change lives on the internal chain m/0'/1/…. If you carved or exported individual keys instead of restoring the seed, sweeping only the receive keys (m/0'/0/…) misses the change entirely. Restoring the seed with the correct m/0' path picks up both chains.

So "MultiBit change addresses missing" is a symptom, not a loss. If a swept balance comes up short, the missing coins are almost always sitting on keys in a later backup or on the change chain, not gone.

MultiBit errors, by the message you're seeing

MultiBit's error messages are terse. Here's what the common ones actually mean.

"Could not load wallet" / "cannot read wallet"

The most common cause is a format mismatch: a MultiBit HD file (mbhd.*) opened in Classic, or a Classic .wallet opened in HD. The two products' formats are incompatible. Check the filename first — mbhd. prefix means HD. The other common cause is genuine file corruption, covered next.

"MultiBit wallet corrupted" / a .wallet or .aes that won't open

Restore from the automatic backups first: wallet-backup/, rolling-backup/, or key-backup/ for Classic, and zip-backup/ for HD. These are frequently intact even when the main file isn't. If no backup survives, the bitcoinj protobuf can often be partially parsed or the private keys carved directly out of the file — the same class of techniques described in our corrupt wallet-file recovery work.

A very old wallet that only "some MultiBit" will open

The earliest Classic wallets used Java serialization rather than protobuf, and only ancient MultiBit builds can read them. We keep the legacy software around for exactly this case, so don't assume a wallet that fails in modern tools is dead.

"Wallet password is incorrect" / forgotten password

Both Classic and HD passwords can be attacked with GPU brute force if you remember fragments or patterns; see forgotten wallet password recovery. Classic's encrypted .key files use only 3 MD5 iterations and fall quickly. Two shortcuts sometimes skip the problem entirely: a .key export you made before setting a password, or an unencrypted automatic backup from early in the wallet's life.

Don't run MultiBit itself — and don't download it

To restate the one rule that matters most: MultiBit's servers are gone, parts of the app fail against the modern network, and the installers on random download sites are exactly where fake and trojaned wallet software lives. The safe path is to take the keys or seed out of the MultiBit files and into modern software — our step-by-step guide to moving Bitcoin from MultiBit into Electrum covers the healthy-wallet case.

If the file is damaged, the password is gone, or the sweep came up short, that's our bread and butter: MultiBit wallet recovery — free assessment, and no fee until your coins are back. Tell us what you have →