What is this MultiBit file, and why won't it open?
Drop a .wallet, .key, .info, mbhd.wallet.aes, or wallet.aes.zip here. It tells you which MultiBit format you have, whether it is encrypted, whether it is complete or truncated, and what the next step is. Nothing is uploaded and no password is ever asked for.
MultiBit files hold live money. Here is exactly what this tool does and does not do. It reads the file locally, in your browser, to identify which MultiBit format it is and report its structure. It never transmits the file anywhere, never stores it, and never shows, exports, copies, or logs a private key, not for an unencrypted .wallet, not for a plain-text .key export, not behind a toggle. It reports format, encryption status, key counts, key dates, and public addresses only. There is no password field: it never attempts decryption or password guessing. It never writes to, renames, or modifies your file.
A MultiBit Classic .key export is plain-text spendable keys. This tool will tell you how many are in it and when they were made, and will not print a single one of them. That restraint is the point: extracting spendable keys is bench work with real consequences if it goes wrong, and not something a web page should hand out.
Given that this is live money, the safest way to run this is the offline copy, disconnected from the internet. It's the recommended path for this tool, not just an option.
.wallet, .key, .info, mbhd.wallet.aes, mbhd.checkpoints, a wallet.aes.zip backup. Nothing leaves this browser tab.Nothing here is uploaded. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab before dropping a file, and confirm nothing fires.
What each MultiBit file is
There were two entirely different products under the MultiBit name, and almost every confusing error comes from mixing them up. Anything whose name starts with mbhd. is MultiBit HD; a bare <name>.wallet is MultiBit Classic. The full reference is MultiBit wallet files: locations, formats, backups, and derivation paths.
.wallet — MultiBit Classic, the wallet itself
Two different formats wore this extension. From roughly 2013 onward it is a bitcoinj protobuf, which begins with a length-prefixed network name (org.bitcoin.production on mainnet) and then a run of key records. The tool above reads that structure directly: how many keys, how many of them are encrypted, when each key was created, and the addresses those keys correspond to. Earlier builds wrote a Java-serialized object stream instead, which starts with the bytes AC ED 00 05 and cannot be read by anything modern.
.key — MultiBit Classic, an exported private key file
Written by Tools → Export Private Keys. In plain text it opens with the literal line # KEEP YOUR PRIVATE KEYS SAFE ! and then carries one Base58 private key and an ISO 8601 date per line. If you set an export password, it is instead base64 text beginning U2FsdGVkX1, which is OpenSSL's Salted__ header, an 8-byte salt, and AES-256-CBC ciphertext. A .key file is enough on its own to recover everything it holds, which is why it is both the best news in a MultiBit recovery and the most dangerous file on your disk.
.info — MultiBit Classic, the sidecar nobody reads
A tiny text file starting multiBit.info,1, holding no keys at all. Its second line is walletVersion,N, and that single number is frequently the whole answer to a wallet that will not load: 1 means its companion .wallet is the old Java-serialized format, 2 means unencrypted protobuf, 3 means protobuf with a password on it. It also lists your receiving addresses in plain text, which lets you check on a block explorer whether this is even the wallet you are looking for before spending another hour on it.
mbhd.wallet.aes — MultiBit HD, the wallet
A bitcoinj protobuf sealed with AES-256-CBC. The first 16 bytes are the initialisation vector and everything after is ciphertext, so a complete file is always a whole number of 16 bytes. There is nothing readable inside it, which is why the filename is what identifies it, and why the useful questions are structural: is it a whole number of blocks, and does it look like real encrypted data.
multibit wallet.aes.zip — MultiBit HD, the folder backup
Written into a zip-backup/ folder on a timestamp, and named mbhd-<wallet id>-<timestamp>.zip.aes. People write it both ways round, wallet.aes.zip and zip.aes, and it is worth being precise about the order because it decides what you can do with it: MultiBit HD zipped the folder and then encrypted the zip. So the file is ciphertext, not an archive, and an unzip tool reporting it as damaged or not an archive is reporting the truth. You need the wallet password to open it, and the tool above will tell you whether it survived the copy intact.
mbhd.checkpoints and mbhd.spvchain — no keys, no money
Block-chain plumbing. The checkpoints file starts with the ASCII text CHECKPOINTS 1, the chain file with SPVB. Neither has ever contained a key or an address. They are named here only because people find them first, alphabetically, and reasonably assume they matter.
MultiBit errors, by the message you are seeing
"Could not load wallet" and "cannot read wallet"
These almost never mean the file is destroyed. In order of how often they turn out to be the cause: the file is a MultiBit HD file being opened in Classic or vice versa (check for the mbhd. prefix first); the wallet is the old Java-serialized format, which nothing modern can parse; or the file really is damaged. The tool above separates those three in one drop, and if you have the sibling .info file, drop that in too, because it states the format outright.
"MultiBit wallet decryption failed" and "wallet password is incorrect"
Two completely different problems produce these words, and MultiBit never told you which one you had. Either the password is wrong, or the file is incomplete and no password will ever open it. Encrypted data is always a whole number of 16-byte AES blocks, so a file that is not block-aligned lost bytes somewhere between the wallet writing it and you reading it. That is a truncated copy, a mangled download, or a partial restore. The tool above checks the alignment without asking for your password, and it is worth ruling out before you spend a month trying to remember something that was never the problem. If the structure is sound, the password really is the open question, and that is password recovery.
"MultiBit wallet corrupted"
Check the automatic backups before anything else. MultiBit Classic kept key-backup/, wallet-backup/, and rolling-backup/ inside a <walletname>-data folder; MultiBit HD kept zip-backup/ and rolling-backup/. These are frequently intact when the main file is not. For a Classic protobuf wallet the tool above reports how far into the file the structure still parses, because a wallet that dies at byte 40,000 of 60,000 usually still has most of its keys in the part that reads, and that is a repair job rather than a loss. The technique is corrupt wallet file recovery.
A MultiBit wallet from 2012 or 2013, and change addresses missing
The oldest Classic wallets are the ones most likely to hand you a short balance after a sweep, and it is nearly always the same cause. A .key export only holds the keys that existed on the day you made it; every address MultiBit generated afterwards, change included, is not in that file. The tool above prints the newest key date in an export for exactly this reason: that date is where the export stops covering you. Sweep from the latest backup you can find, not the first.
MultiBit derivation path and the address gap limit
MultiBit HD did not use the BIP44 path modern wallets expect. It derived under m/0': receiving addresses on m/0'/0, change on m/0'/1. Restore the 12 words with a default BIP44 path and you get an empty wallet and conclude the coins are gone. They are not; the wallet is looking in the wrong place. Restore as a BIP39 seed, legacy (p2pkh), path m/0', step by step in moving Bitcoin from MultiBit into Electrum.
The gap limit is the second thing to check when a correctly restored wallet still looks short. Electrum stops scanning ahead after a run of consecutive unused addresses (20 by default), so coins sitting past a long gap are simply outside the window it looked at. Raising the gap limit and rescanning costs nothing and is worth doing before concluding anything is missing. MultiBit Classic is not HD at all, so none of this applies to it: there is no path to get wrong, only keys to sweep.
Can MultiBit still be opened in 2026? Is MultiBit still supported?
No, and it does not matter. MultiBit has been abandoned since 2017, its servers are gone, and the old domain no longer belongs to the project, so the download links in every surviving tutorial lead somewhere you should not install from. But your coins do not live in the application, they live in the files, and those do not expire. A .wallet, a .key, an mbhd.wallet.aes, or the 12 words will recover your Bitcoin in 2026 exactly as they would have in 2016. The whole point of this tool is to work on the files without running MultiBit at all.
Where MultiBit put your files
MultiBit Classic's default folder is %APPDATA%\MultiBit\ on Windows (that is C:\Users\<you>\AppData\Roaming\MultiBit\), ~/Library/Application Support/MultiBit/ on macOS, and ~/MultiBit/ on Linux. MultiBit HD used %APPDATA%\MultiBitHD\, ~/Library/Application Support/MultiBitHD/, and ~/.multibit-hd/ respectively, with each wallet in its own mbhd-<wallet id> folder.
Classic also let you save a wallet anywhere, so an empty default folder proves nothing. Search every old drive, backup disk, and cloud-sync folder for *.wallet, *.key, and mbhd.wallet.aes before concluding anything is lost, and check inside any -data folder you find. The per-platform detail, including what lives in each backup subfolder, is in the MultiBit file reference.
What this diagnostic can and can't tell you
It can tell you: which MultiBit format a file is and how confident that identification is, whether a Classic .wallet is password-encrypted, how many keys it holds and when they were created, the public addresses in it, which wallet version an .info sidecar points at, how many keys a .key export holds and the date range they cover, and whether an encrypted MultiBit HD file or .key export is structurally complete or has lost bytes.
It cannot tell you the password. It never tries, there is no password field, and that will not change. It does not print, export, or copy private keys, including from an unencrypted wallet or a plain-text .key file where they are sitting right there in the open. It does not sweep, spend, or move anything. And keys are not balance: a wallet with a hundred keys and a wallet with none can both be empty on-chain, so check the addresses.
If a file turns out not to be MultiBit at all, the wallet file inspector identifies wallet files generally. If the file is damaged, the password is gone, or a sweep came up short, that is what MultiBit wallet recovery is for: free assessment, and no fee until your coins are back.
FAQ
Is it safe to drop my MultiBit wallet here?
The file is read locally in your browser and never transmitted, stored, or modified. No private key is ever displayed, copied, exported, or logged, not even from a plain-text .key export where the keys are in the open. It reports format, structure, key counts, dates, and public addresses only. That said, this is live money, and the recommended way to run it is the offline copy above, disconnected from the internet.
MultiBit says decryption failed. Is my password wrong?
Not necessarily, and this tells you for free. MultiBit HD's mbhd.wallet.aes and .zip.aes files are a 16-byte initialisation vector followed by AES ciphertext, which is always a whole number of 16-byte blocks, and an encrypted Classic .key export works the same way. If this tool reports the file as block-aligned, nothing is missing and the password is the open question. If it reports an incomplete block, bytes were lost when the file was copied, downloaded, or restored, and no password can open it in that state. Those two answers lead to completely different work.
Why can't MultiBit open my wallet?
Most often it is a format mismatch rather than damage: a MultiBit HD file (anything named mbhd.) opened in Classic, or the reverse. The next most common cause is that the wallet is the earliest Java-serialized format, which only old MultiBit builds can read. Genuine corruption is third. Drop the file above to find out which, and drop the sibling .info file too if you have one, because it states the wallet version outright.
What derivation path does MultiBit HD use?
m/0', not the BIP44 m/44'/0'/0' that modern wallets default to. Receiving addresses are on m/0'/0 and change is on m/0'/1. Restoring the 12 words with the default path produces an empty wallet, which people reasonably read as their coins being gone; it means the wallet is looking in the wrong place. MultiBit Classic is not HD and has no derivation path at all.
I swept my MultiBit keys and the balance is short
A .key export only contains the keys that existed the day you exported it. Anything MultiBit generated afterwards, including change from later spends, is not in that file. This tool prints the newest key date in an export precisely so you can see where its coverage stops. Look in the wallet's -data/key-backup/ folder for a later snapshot and sweep from the newest one you can find. For MultiBit HD, change lives on the internal chain m/0'/1, so restoring the seed picks up both chains where sweeping individual receive keys does not.
Can you get the private keys out?
Yes. That is the actual recovery service, done carefully and offline, not something a web page should hand out automatically. This tool deliberately stops at structure and public data so that dropping a file here can never itself be the thing that loses you money.