Electrum has been one of Bitcoin's most important wallets for over a decade, which means a large number of long-term holders have old Electrum files, seeds, watch-only wallets, and 2FA wallets that no longer behave the way they expect.
Some Electrum problems are simple support issues with a five-minute answer. Some are real recovery cases. Sorting those apart, without putting your keys at risk in the process, is the first thing worth doing.
Situations I recover from
The wallet file is corrupt or will not load. Truncated copies, interrupted writes, failing drives. Copy the file first. If you also have the seed, this is usually not a recovery case at all, because in Electrum the seed is the wallet.
Forgotten wallet password, no seed. Electrum has no password reset by design, so with the file and no seed the only route is an offline attack. Your remembered fragments and password habits decide the odds far more than the hardware does.
A seed Electrum will not accept. Electrum's own seed format is not BIP-39. A valid Trust Wallet, Ledger, or Trezor phrase is rejected as invalid unless you tick the BIP39 option during restore. This single setting accounts for a large share of "my seed does not work" cases.
A seed that restores an empty wallet. Wrong seed type, wrong derivation path, a forgotten passphrase, or a gap limit that stopped scanning too early. The words are usually right and the lookup is wrong.
2FA and multisig wallets. An Electrum two-factor wallet is a 2-of-3 multisig in which your seed holds two keys. A dead co-signer service is not a lost wallet. General multisig needs enough co-signer material to rebuild the quorum.
Watch-only wallet confusion. A watch-only wallet shows a balance it cannot spend. The question is where the spendable keys or seed went, and that is a search problem more than a cryptographic one.
Large, stuck, or rejected transactions. A wallet full of small inputs can fail to build a transaction at all. That is not a lost-wallet problem; it needs careful coin control, and the large-transaction guide covers it for free.
What to do right now
- Copy the wallet file before running anything against it, and work only on the copy.
- Stop importing your seed into random tools and websites. Every paste is an exposure, and none of them will diagnose the actual problem.
- Work out which seed standard you have before restoring again. Electrum's own format and BIP-39 look identical and behave completely differently.
- Write down the exact error text you see. "Invalid seed," "checksum failed," and "the wallet is empty" are three different problems with three different fixes. If the error is about the file rather than the seed, run the copy through the Electrum wallet file inspector first; it will tell you whether the file is damaged or merely locked, and those two answers lead to entirely different work.
- Note the wallet type if you know it: standard, imported keys, multisig, 2FA, or watch-only.
- Find a receiving address that should hold funds, so a restored candidate can be checked against the right wallet.
Do not send your seed phrase in a first email to anyone, including me.
Diagnose it yourself first
Start with the file itself. The Electrum wallet file inspector reads your wallet file in your own browser, uploads nothing, and never asks for a password. It separates the three things that all present as "it won't open": a file encrypted with a password you have forgotten, a file that has been truncated or zero-filled and can never be opened by any password, and a file that is fine but was made by a newer Electrum than the one you are running. It also names the wallet type, and reads the derivation path to tell you whether the seed behind it is an Electrum seed or a BIP-39 one, which is the single most common reason a restore comes back empty. There is an offline copy to download and run disconnected, which is the recommended way to use it on a real wallet.
Electrum wallet won't open? Four failure modes and how to fix each is the free version of this page's diagnostic: the corrupt file case, the file-without-a-password case, the seed-restores-empty case, and the 2FA and multisig case, plus the Trust Wallet seed problem and a section on what is not an Electrum recovery problem at all.
If you are migrating out of MultiBit rather than recovering Electrum itself, start with the MultiBit to Electrum transfer guide.
How the recovery works
The process is the same five steps I use for every recovery: an honest assessment, a written contract, secure transfer of the wallet file, the recovery work itself, and return of your coins to an address you control. You pay nothing unless I succeed. The fee is published openly: 15% of the recovered amount for wallets under 100 BTC. Before you send anything, read what happens to your wallet file once you send it, from transfer through to destruction.
A large share of Electrum enquiries turn out to be support questions with a free answer, and I would rather tell you that than take the case. When it is genuinely a recovery job, you will know who is doing it: David Veksler, through a Colorado-registered LLC with a physical address, a written contract, and a published PGP key.