You can’t get into your wallet. Maybe the password stopped working, the app disappeared with a phone you replaced, or the words you wrote down in 2017 won’t restore anything. Whichever way you lost access to your crypto wallet, the right next step depends entirely on what you still have — and a wrong move now can close doors that are still open. So take stock before you act.
What you’ve lost, and what you haven’t
Your coins aren’t gone. They sit on the blockchain, in a public record that hasn’t changed since your last transaction. The wallet never contained them. What a crypto wallet really holds are your private keys — the secret codes that let you spend. Lose the wallet and you’ve lost a key, not the money.
Who can help depends on which kind of wallet it is. A custodial wallet, an account at an exchange such as Coinbase or Kraken where the company keeps the keys for you, comes with a support desk, an identity check, and a reset flow. A non-custodial wallet (MetaMask, Electrum, a Ledger or Trezor, a wallet.dat file on your own computer) comes with none of that. Nobody holds a spare key, so nobody can reset it for you. From here, what’s possible rests on the key material still in your hands: a seed phrase, a wallet file, a device, or a password you partly remember.
Losing a key is common enough to measure. Chainalysis has estimated that around 3.7 million Bitcoin, roughly a fifth of everything ever mined, sits in wallets that haven’t moved in years, much of it presumed stranded.
Before you try anything else
Four rules protect your options.
Write down everything you remember, first. Password candidates, the base words you tend to reuse, where a backup card might be, which computer the wallet lived on. Do it before testing a single guess, while your memory is still clean.
Stop entering PINs on a hardware wallet. A Ledger wipes itself after three wrong attempts; a Trezor adds a longer delay after every miss and wipes after the sixteenth. The wipe removes the keys from the device, not your coins. But if you’re not sure your written phrase is correct, those remaining attempts matter.
If a wallet file was deleted, or the drive it lived on is failing, stop using that drive. Deleting a file doesn’t erase it; it marks the space as free for reuse. Every new write can overwrite the sectors your wallet still occupies.
And never type your seed phrase into a website, an online tool, or a chat with someone offering help. No exceptions. Whoever has those words has the wallet.
What you still have decides what’s possible
The scenarios below run from the strongest position to the weakest. Find yours and start there.
You still have your seed phrase
This is the best position to be in, and the easiest recovery process there is, whether the wallet held Bitcoin or anything else. The seed phrase — usually 12 or 24 English words drawn from one fixed public list — regenerates every key in the wallet, which is why it works on a brand-new device or a fresh install. Download the wallet’s official app from the vendor’s own site, choose ‘Restore’ or ‘I already have a wallet’, and enter the words in their original order. One wrong word or a swapped pair usually gets the phrase rejected, or opens a different, empty wallet.
A zero balance after a correct restore doesn’t prove the phrase is wrong. The usual causes: the app is deriving along a different path, the route from your words to your accounts, like a street address for keys — or you used a passphrase, an extra secret word that opens a hidden wallet on top of the standard one. Forgotten passphrases are their own scenario, covered here.
Your exchange account is locked
The provider can let you back in. Holding your keys for you is their whole model, so go through the official support flow only: identity verification, backup codes, a 2FA reset if your phone is gone. Expect days rather than minutes, and expect document checks. One warning: real support never contacts you first. Anyone who reaches out unprompted about your locked account is impersonating support.
You forgot the wallet password, but the wallet is still there
Often workable, depending on what you remember. Wallet files are encrypted with AES-256, and a completely unknown strong password can’t be brute-forced by anyone; the search space is too large for any hardware on earth.
Partial memory changes the math.
A rough length, a base word, the pattern you reused everywhere in 2016: constraints like these shrink billions of candidates to a set that GPU-based software can test systematically, hundreds of thousands of combinations per second. Build your list of hints before you try anything. Our Bitcoin wallet password guide shows how.
The wallet file is deleted, or the drive is dying
Often recoverable, if the drive is left alone. A deleted wallet.dat or backup usually still sits in space the system has merely marked as free, until something overwrites it. On a healthy drive, free tools like PhotoRec or Recuva (downloaded only from their developers’ sites) can carve deleted files back out. A failing drive is different: image it first with ddrescue and work on the copy, or hand it to a data-recovery specialist the moment it clicks or drops off the system. Make two copies of anything you find before opening it.
What to do with a recovered wallet file, password step included, is covered in our wallet.dat guide. If you’re not even sure which machine or account the wallet lived on, start with how to find a lost Bitcoin wallet.
Your hardware wallet is lost, broken, or wiped
The device was only ever the keyholder, not the vault. Buy a replacement directly from the manufacturer, choose the restore option, and enter your recovery phrase. Your balances load straight from the blockchain, because they never left it. A broken device with an intact phrase is an inconvenience. A broken device with no phrase is a seed problem, not a hardware problem — what to check before you conclude anything is in our guide to broken and lost hardware wallets.
The seed phrase is wrong, or words are missing
Frequently still fixable, within limits. A phrase the wallet rejects as invalid usually means one wrong word, two swapped positions, or a letter misread from your own handwriting: the last word contains a checksum, a built-in math check over all the others, so most errors invalidate the whole phrase. Our invalid mnemonic guide explains how to correct it.
Missing words are a numbers problem. Each gap has exactly 2,048 candidates. One missing word is testable in seconds, and even three or four can stay feasible when you know their positions, because the checksum rules out most combinations before they’re tried. Beyond four missing words, the search space stops being realistic; our missing-word guide walks through the process.
When recovery isn’t possible: you have nothing left
Then the honest answer is that there’s nothing to work from. No phrase, no file, no exported key, no device, and no partial memory of a password. The words in a seed phrase were drawn at random, and random leaves nothing behind to reconstruct — a completely lost phrase can’t be rebuilt by anyone, for any fee. We’d rather say that plainly than run an assessment that can only end one way.
Before you accept it, search properly. Old phones, old email attachments, cloud drives, the notebook from that year, the drawer with the dead USB sticks. People find backups in places they stopped checking years ago.
How professional recovery works
Legitimate recovery is engineering, not magic. The core of the work is narrowing a search space: turning the general shape of what you remember into constraints a computer can test methodically, always on copies of your files, never the originals. At Crypto Recovers that testing runs on air-gapped machines, computers with no internet connection at all, and no work starts before both sides have signed the contract; an NDA is available on request. Where the wallet format allows it, we work from the password hash extracted from the encrypted file, so attempts run without anyone needing to see your actual password. We’ve been performing recoveries since 2019, with more than 200 wallets recovered so far, including cases other services had already attempted without success. What we take on, and how the process runs, is on our wallet recovery page.
Lost access is not the same as theft
If coins moved out of your wallet without you, you’re not locked out — you’ve been robbed, and that’s a different problem with different rules. Blockchain transactions are irreversible by design: no service can pull one back, and anyone claiming to reverse a transaction is describing something that cannot be done. Stolen coins stay publicly visible on the blockchain, but watching them move is not the same as getting them back. Report the theft to your local police and, in the United States, to the FBI at ic3.gov. We don’t take stolen-crypto or scam cases; our work is technical access reconstruction for people who still own what they can’t reach.
The same moment attracts a second wave of thieves: fake recovery experts who find victims in comment sections and inboxes. The pattern repeats: guaranteed results, pressure to decide today, an upfront fee, and eventually a request for your seed phrase. Each of those is a tell on its own. Legitimate services don’t charge upfront and don’t guarantee results, and no legitimate service needs your coins to pass through its hands. How to vet a recovery company is covered in our guide to finding a legitimate one, and the broader warning signs of crypto scams have their own article.
Keep the next lockout from happening
Once you’re back in, sweep: move everything to a brand-new wallet with a freshly generated phrase, rather than keep using one whose secrets may have been exposed along the way. Then fix the backup that failed you. Paper fades and burns; a phrase stamped into metal survives the house fire that destroys the original. Keep two copies in two places, and never as a photo, a cloud note, or a text file — anything that syncs can leak. Test the backup once, deliberately, before you ever need it.
If your situation sits somewhere in the middle — words missing from a phrase, a file that won’t open, a password you half remember — Crypto Recovers offers a free assessment: describe what you have, and you’ll get an honest answer about what’s technically possible before any commitment, on a No Cure No Pay basis. Your coins never pass through our hands, and we have no way to reach them. When a recovery succeeds, you move everything to a new wallet you created yourself and transfer the agreed percentage yourself, with both parties present.
