What is this wallet file?
Found a file on an old drive and don't know what it is, or need to know whether your wallet.dat is encrypted or corrupt before paying anyone to look at it? Drop it here.
This file contains private keys. Here is exactly what this tool does and does not do. It reads the file locally, in your browser, to identify it and (for a Bitcoin Core wallet.dat) report its structure. It never transmits the file anywhere, never stores it, and never shows, exports, copies, or logs any private key, not for an unencrypted wallet, not behind a toggle. It reports structure and public data only: format, encryption status, key counts, and addresses. It never attempts decryption or password guessing, there is no password field. It never writes to, renames, or modifies your file.
I could show you the private keys. I deliberately don't: pulling spendable keys out of a wallet file is professional recovery work with real consequences if it goes wrong (screenshots, clipboard managers, shoulder surfing, malware), and that isn't 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.
Nothing here is uploaded. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab before dropping a file, and confirm nothing fires.
What these files are
Bitcoin Core wallet.dat, legacy (Berkeley DB)
Bitcoin Core (and Bitcoin-Qt before it) stored wallets in a Berkeley DB file called wallet.dat from the very beginning through version 0.20. It holds your private keys, public keys, transaction history, and address labels in one file. On Windows it normally lives at %APPDATA%\Bitcoin\wallet.dat; on macOS at ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin/wallet.dat; on Linux at ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat. If you moved or reinstalled at some point, it may be sitting in a backup folder, an old external drive, or a cloud sync folder instead. Recovery usually means either a forgotten passphrase (GPU brute force) or a corrupted file (structural repair), and telling those apart is exactly what this tool does.
Bitcoin Core wallet.dat, descriptor era (SQLite)
Starting with version 0.21, Bitcoin Core switched new wallets to a SQLite database, still named wallet.dat, living in the same default locations. This matters because a lot of the wallet-recovery tooling people find online (including old copies of pywallet) only understands the Berkeley DB format and fails silently or with a confusing error on a SQLite wallet.dat. This tool tells the two apart correctly and says so plainly, which most tools people find by searching don't.
Ethereum keystore files
Geth, MyEtherWallet, and most Ethereum tooling can export a keystore file: a JSON document named something like UTC--2021-03-14T12-00-00.000000000Z--a1b2c3..., holding one password-encrypted private key. The address is embedded in the file so you can identify which account it is without decrypting anything.
Electrum wallets
Electrum stores its wallet as a JSON file, encrypted by default since 2016 (an opaque base64 blob) or in plain JSON if encryption was turned off (identifiable by a seed_version field). Electrum uses its own wallet format, not Bitcoin Core's, so a wallet.dat tool won't touch it and vice versa.
Blockchain.info / Blockchain.com wallets
Wallet exports from Blockchain.info (now Blockchain.com) are JSON files with an encrypted payload field and a pbkdf2_iterations count. The oldest exports predate that wrapper and are just a raw base64 blob.
MultiBit Classic, MultiBit HD, and Armory
These are all discontinued. MultiBit Classic used a .wallet file (protobuf) with a companion .key file; MultiBit HD used an encrypted mbhd.wallet.aes file inside its own folder structure; Armory used its own .wallet format with a private signature this tool couldn't independently verify against a real sample, so any match here is labeled a guess, not a confirmed identification.
KeePass and other password vaults
A great many "lost wallet" cases turn out to be a seed phrase or password sitting inside an old KeePass database (.kdbx) nobody remembers the master password for. This tool recognizes the format but can't open it, there's no password field here by design.
Plain text and paper backups
Sometimes the file in question is just a .txt file with a seed phrase, a WIF private key, or an extended key typed or pasted into it. This tool detects that a file looks like it contains one of those and tells you the count, without ever printing the actual secret back to your screen.
Finding a wallet.dat you've lost track of
If you know you had one but can't find it: search the whole drive, not just the default folder, for files literally named wallet.dat (Windows' search, macOS's mdfind -name wallet.dat, or Linux's find / -name wallet.dat from a live-boot USB if the OS won't start). Check backup drives, old email attachments, and cloud-sync folders (Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive) from around when you last used the wallet. A genuine wallet.dat is rarely tiny; if a candidate file is a few KB, it's more likely a template or an empty wallet than the one with your coins in it.
What the inspector can and can't tell you
It can tell you: the file format and how confident that identification is, whether a Bitcoin Core wallet.dat is passphrase-encrypted, whether its internal structure parses cleanly or looks corrupted or truncated, how many keys it holds, and the public addresses those keys correspond to.
It cannot tell you the password (it never tries, and never will). It cannot recover a file that's been genuinely overwritten at the disk level, structural inspection only helps with a file that still exists, however damaged. And a wallet with keys in it is not the same thing as a wallet with a balance: the only way to know if there's money in it is to check the addresses, which is exactly why the optional balance check exists below the results.
FAQ
Is it safe to open my wallet.dat here?
This tool reads the file locally in your browser and never transmits, stores, or displays any private key material, not even for an unencrypted wallet. It reports structure and public data only. That said, this is live money, and the recommended way to run this tool is the offline copy above, disconnected from the internet. That's not just an option here, it's the safer default for this specific tool.
My wallet.dat won't open in Bitcoin Core
Three different problems get lumped together under "won't open": the file is corrupted (this tool checks for that directly), the wallet is encrypted and Core is asking for a passphrase you don't have, or the file is a newer or older format than the Core version you're running expects. Drop it here first to find out which one you're dealing with, then read about corrupt wallet file recovery or Bitcoin Core wallet recovery.
How do I find my wallet.dat?
Check the default location for your OS first (paths are above), then search the whole drive for files named exactly wallet.dat, plus any backup drives, old email attachments, and cloud-sync folders from around when you last used the wallet.
It says encrypted, now what?
An encrypted wallet.dat means the keys are protected by a passphrase; the file itself isn't damaged. If you don't remember the passphrase, that's a password recovery case: GPU brute force against the specific passphrase patterns you might have used, not a guessing game against every possible password.
The addresses show no balance
Three common explanations: this isn't actually the wallet file that held the coins (people often have several old wallet.dat files from different points in time), the coins were spent a long time ago and you're looking at a used, empty address, or you're looking at a change address that never received the deposit you remember. None of that means the file is worthless, it just means the balance question needs the right addresses checked, which the optional balance lookup helps with.
Can you get the private keys out?
Yes. That's 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.