This page is a router, not a guide. Every situation below is a different problem with different tools, different odds, and its own page on this site that goes deep on it. Find the sentence that sounds like what happened to you, and follow it.
One thing worth knowing before you start: "lost" usually does not mean "gone." Coins live on the blockchain, not in the wallet. The wallet only holds the keys. If nobody moved your coins, this is an access problem, and access problems have methods.
If money is moving out of your wallet right now, stop reading and go to hacked wallet rescue. That one is a race, and minutes matter.
"My wallet won't open"
The app launches and then fails, hangs, or rejects the file. This is a file problem, not a password problem, and the two get confused constantly.
- Corrupt wallet file recovery — extracting keys from damaged, truncated, or obsolete files, including formats whose software no longer exists.
- Electrum won't open your wallet — the specific Electrum failures: corrupt files, 2FA wallets, multisig that will not restore.
- Recovering a corrupt or deleted Bitcoin Core wallet
— damaged Berkeley DB
wallet.datfiles, the most recoverable case on this list. - Not sure what the file even is? Drop it into the wallet file inspector. It identifies the format in your browser, and the file never leaves your machine.
"I forgot the password"
The file or account is intact. You simply cannot remember what unlocks it. This is the most common case and the most recoverable one, because partial memory is worth far more than people assume.
- Forgotten wallet password recovery — how clues about length, era, habits, and word choice become a targeted candidate list tested on GPU hardware instead of hopeless blind guessing.
- Ideas for remembering your forgotten Bitcoin password — techniques for dragging a password out of memory, old machines, and old habits before any cracking starts.
- How I recover a forgotten Bitcoin Core wallet.dat password
— what the work actually looks like on a
wallet.dat. - How I brute force Blockchain.info wallets — the same job on the legacy web wallet formats.
"My seed phrase restored an empty wallet"
You typed all the words, the wallet accepted them, and the balance is zero or the addresses are strangers. A valid seed opening the wrong wallet is a routing problem, not a loss. Don't re-enter the seed anywhere else until you've read this.
- Your seed phrase restored an empty wallet — derivation paths, gap limits, and hidden passphrases, and how to tell which one you hit.
- Bitcoin Core restored but no balance — rescans, pruned nodes, keypool gaps, and wrong-wallet mixups, in the order to check them.
"Some of my seed words are missing or wrong"
You have the backup card, but words are missing, smudged, misspelled, miscopied, or in an order you are no longer sure about. How much is reconstructible depends on exactly what is wrong and how much of the phrase survives, which is what the assessment is for.
- Seed phrase recovery — reconstructing BIP-39 backups with missing, misordered, or misspelled words, and evaluating Shamir/SLIP-39 shares.
- A guide to seed recovery for cryptocurrency wallets — how the checksum narrows the search, and why a wordlist is not a password list.
"My device is dead, wiped, or I lost the PIN"
Hardware wallets fail as hardware. A broken screen, a dead button, a water-damaged board, or a device that wiped itself after too many PIN attempts are all different jobs, and some of them are bench work rather than computation.
- Trezor recovery and repair — dead screens repaired at my Denver bench, forgotten passphrases and PINs, incomplete BIP-39 backups, Shamir shares.
- Ledger wallet recovery — device faults, forgotten PINs, and passphrase work on Ledger's 24-word backups.
- How to restore a Trezor: lost PIN, wiped device, or broken hardware — what to try yourself first, in order.
"The file is corrupt, or I deleted it"
A file that is damaged and a file that is gone from the disk are two different emergencies, and the deleted one has a clock on it. Every write to that drive lowers the odds.
- Corrupt wallet file recovery — key extraction from damaged and obsolete formats.
- Your wallet file is deleted, not corrupt: what to do in the first hour — why file-carving tools won't find it by name, and how SSD TRIM decides your odds. Read this before you touch the drive.
- Wallet file inspector — confirm that what you pulled off the disk is actually a wallet, and which kind, before you send it anywhere.
"Someone drained my wallet"
Somebody else has your keys. This is not a password problem and it is not a slow problem. If anything is left in the wallet, the job is to move it out ahead of the sweeper bot.
- Hacked wallet rescue — time-critical extraction from a compromised wallet.
- My Bitcoin was stolen, can you help? — the honest answer about coins that already left your address, and what is actually worth doing next.
- How I recover stolen NFTs from crypto scammers — the narrow case where assets stranded in a compromised wallet can still be pulled out.
"The wallet belonged to someone who died"
Estate access is a paperwork problem wrapped around a technical one, and executors need both halves documented.
- Crypto estate recovery — accessing a deceased holder's crypto, with the paper trail estates, executors, and courts need.
"It was on a phone I can't get into"
- iPhone wallet recovery — extracting a wallet seed from a locked or wiped phone, including forensic KeyChain work.
- How to extract a crypto wallet seed from an iPhone — the technical version of the same job.
"I know which wallet, not which problem"
If you'd rather start from the software, start here. Each page covers that wallet's own file formats, failure modes, and methods.
- Bitcoin Core / wallet.dat — the oldest format and one of the most
recoverable: forgotten passphrases, corrupt Berkeley DB files, deleted
wallet.dat, pre-2014 versions. - Trezor — hardware faults, PINs, passphrases, Shamir backups.
- Ledger — device faults, PINs, 24-word backups.
- Blockchain.com / Blockchain.info — password recovery for the
legacy web wallet, including the v1/v2/v3 formats and the
wallet.aes.jsonbackup. See also lost your Blockchain.com Wallet ID? and backup file won't decrypt. - Multibit Classic and Multibit HD — the discontinued 2011 to 2017 wallet that still strands a lot of early Bitcoin. See also MultiBit wallet files: locations, formats, backups, and derivation paths.
- Electrum — corrupt wallet files, forgotten passwords, seed issues.
- iPhone and mobile wallets — seed extraction from locked or wiped phones.
Don't see your wallet? MetaMask, Exodus, and dozens of others share the same password-and-seed mechanics underneath. Describe what you have and I'll tell you whether it's viable.
"Is this recoverable at all?"
The honest answer depends entirely on what you still have, and there are cases where the answer is no. A completely lost seed phrase with no wallet file and no backup leaves nothing to work from, and no legitimate service can conjure keys out of nothing. Coins that already left your address are a completed theft rather than an access problem, and anyone offering to "trace and reverse" them is selling you a second loss.
- What are the odds of recovering your crypto wallet? — honest answers scenario by scenario, including the ones that end in no.
- How does a Bitcoin wallet recovery service work? — the process end to end, before you commit to anything.
- Get your crypto wallet back ASAP — what genuinely speeds a recovery up, and what only feels urgent.
- Wallet and key recovery tools — the browser-side tools on this site, plus the open-source ones worth trying yourself first.
"How do I know you're not a scam?"
Fair question, and the right one to ask of anybody in this industry, including me. This space is full of operators who prey on people who have already lost money once.
- How to tell a legitimate crypto recovery service from a scam — the full checklist, applied to anyone you're considering.
- How to hire a Bitcoin recovery expert — what to ask before you hand over a file.
- Impersonation warning — the accounts and addresses that pretend to be this service, and the ones that actually are.
The short version: a named, verifiable human (David Veksler, working through Veksler Consulting LLC, registered in Colorado with a physical address), published pricing at 15% of the recovered amount under 100 BTC and 10% above it, no upfront fee, ever, a written contract before any work starts, a published PGP key to check every message against, and honest odds including "no." I never contact anyone first. If someone using my name messaged you, it wasn't me. If your question is the narrower one, what happens to your wallet file once you send it, that is answered in full on the FAQ.
Still not sure which one you have
That's normal, and it's what the free assessment is for. Describe what you still have: the file, the device, the words you remember, what happened and when. You'll get an honest read on whether recovery is likely, including when it isn't, and there's no fee unless your crypto comes back.