How to Find an Old Bitcoin Wallet (Email, Files & Old Sites)

You bought some Bitcoin years ago. Maybe it was 2013, maybe 2017. Now it's worth a lot more, and you can't remember where you put it.

You can't look up a Bitcoin wallet by your name or email address. Bitcoin has no accounts, so there's no central list to search. But almost every wallet leaves something behind: a welcome email, a file on an old laptop, a backup in Dropbox, a page of words in a drawer. Find that trace and you'll usually know where the coins are.

We can't run this search for you. It would mean going through your email accounts and your old computers, and only you should do that. This guide shows you where to look, and if you find the wallet but can't get into it, we can help with that part.

First, work out which kind of wallet you had

Your search splits in two, and the split decides who can help you get back in.

• An account with a company. Coinbase, Kraken, Blockchain.com's account, Mt. Gox. The company held the coins, and you logged in with an email and password. If the company still exists, its own account recovery is your route back in.
• A wallet you held yourself. Bitcoin Core, Electrum, MultiBit, an early Blockchain.info wallet, a phone app, a paper wallet. Nobody else holds your keys, so you need the wallet file or the recovery phrase, plus its password if it had one. If the password is the problem, that's the kind of recovery we do.

Step 1: Pin down when and how you bought

Start with dates, because the year narrows the list of wallets you could have used.

• Bank and card statements. A transfer to Coinbase, Bitstamp, Kraken or Mt. Gox names the company that sold you the coins.
• PayPal, Venmo and old receipts. Early buyers often paid a person or a small exchange.
• Old tax returns and accountant emails. If you ever reported a sale, the records may name the exchange.
• Texts and chats. A friend who "set you up" may remember the app you used.

Write down the year you bought and every email address you used at the time. You'll need both in the next step.

Step 2: Search your email

This is the fastest way to find an old wallet, and it's what most people mean when they ask how to find a Bitcoin wallet by email.

Log in to every address you used back then, including work, school and old internet-provider accounts. Then search each inbox, including spam and archive folders, for:

• bitcoin, BTC, wallet, crypto
• welcome, verify your email, confirm your account
• Wallet ID, recovery phrase, backup, wallet.aes.json
• deposit, receipt, withdrawal
• service names: Coinbase, Blockchain, Mt. Gox, Kraken, Bitstamp, Jaxx, Breadwallet, Xapo

What a match tells you:

If you've lost access to the email address itself, try the email provider's account recovery first. Getting the inbox back is often easier than getting the wallet back without it.

Step 3: Search old computers, drives and cloud backups for wallet files

Desktop wallets saved a wallet file on your computer, usually encrypted with the password you chose. If you still have the computer, or a backup of it, the file may still be there.

Where to look:

• Old laptops and desktops. Even a dead one can be read by connecting its drive to another computer. On an old drive, look under the old user's profile folder, not your current one.
• External drives and USB sticks. People often copied a backup and forgot about it.
• Backups. Time Machine snapshots on a Mac, and services like Backblaze or Carbonite, can hold files from the year you bought.
• Cloud storage and email. Search Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive and iCloud Drive for the file names above, and search your email for them too.

When you find a file, copy it before you open it in anything. Work from the copy and keep the original untouched. If you set a password on the wallet, you'll need that password to open the file, but keep the file even if you can't remember it: any password recovery starts from it. If it's a Bitcoin Core wallet.dat, our Bitcoin Core password guide shows how to check whether it's encrypted and test your guesses safely.

Step 4: Check phones, browsers and password managers

• Old phones. Charge them up and look at the installed apps. Breadwallet, Mycelium, Jaxx, Coinomi, Airbitz and the Blockchain app were all popular early on.
• Saved passwords. Your browser's password manager (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) and apps like LastPass or 1Password store the sites you signed up for, and often the password too. A saved login for a wallet site tells you where you made the wallet. Our guide to finding old passwords walks through each browser.
• Browser history. If the wallet is recent enough, the site may still be in your history.

Step 5: Look for anything on paper

Check safes, safe deposit boxes, notebooks and filing cabinets. What you find tells you a lot:

• 12 or 24 words. Most likely a BIP39 recovery phrase, used by many wallets from 2013 onward. The words don't tell you which wallet made them, but most modern wallets can restore them. Read our guide to 24-word recovery phrases, and if a word is missing, our missing-word guide.
• 12 words from Electrum. Electrum 2.0 and later make their own seed type, not BIP39, so restore an Electrum seed in Electrum.
• A longer list of words from an old Blockchain.info wallet. Early Blockchain.info wallets used their own legacy mnemonics. See our guide to Blockchain.com legacy mnemonics.
• A printed page with a QR code and a long string. Probably a paper wallet. Our paper wallet guide explains how to read it.
• A long string of letters and numbers. It could be an address, a private key or something else. Our guide to identifying a long crypto string helps you tell them apart.

Whatever you find, never type recovery words or private keys into a website, and never give them to anyone who contacts you unprompted.

Step 6: Check whether there's Bitcoin there

If you find a Bitcoin address (it starts with 1, 3 or bc1), you can check its balance on a public block explorer such as mempool.space or Blockchain.com's explorer. That's safe: an address is public and can't move coins. It's worth doing before you pay anyone for help.

An address can't tell you which wallet made it. It can hint at the era: addresses starting with bc1 date from 2017 or later.

Old Bitcoin wallet sites and apps

If a name below shows up in your email or on your old computer, this list shows where it stands today.

Shut down, often after thefts or losses. If your coins were held by one of these, they're most likely gone:

• Mt. Gox (2010 to 2014)
• MyBitcoin (2010 to 2011)
• Bitcoinica (2011 to 2012)
• Crypto X Change (2011 to 2012)
• Instawallet (2011 to 2013)
• Bitfloor (2011 to 2013)
• 37coins (2013 to 2015)

Discontinued or renamed. The company or app moved on, but a wallet you held yourself still works if you have its file or phrase:

• MultiBit: support ended in July 2017. We still work with old MultiBit wallet files; see our MultiBit password guide.
• Copay: now BitPay Wallet.
• Airbitz: became Edge in 2018.
• GreenAddress: became Blockstream Green in 2019.
• Breadwallet (BRD): Coinbase acquired BRD in late 2021 and offered BRD users a move to Coinbase Wallet.
• Jaxx and Jaxx Liberty: Jaxx Liberty was retired on March 27, 2023. Jaxx used a 12-word recovery phrase.
• Xapo: became Xapo Bank in 2020 and stopped serving US customers in 2021.
• StrongCoin: see what happened to StrongCoin and our StrongCoin paper backup guide.

Web wallets and exchanges from that era: Blockchain.info, now Blockchain.com (2011), Coinbase (2012), Kraken, Bitstamp, Bittrex, BitGo, BTC.com, Cryptonator and Circle.

Desktop and mobile wallets from that era: Bitcoin Core (the original wallet, 2009), Electrum (2011), Armory, Bitcoin Knots, Bither, Mycelium, Coinomi, Coins.ph, the Bitcoin.com wallet and Exodus (2016).

Paper wallet generators: BitAddress and BitcoinPaperWallet.com.

Found the wallet but can't get in?

What you do next depends on what you found.

• An account with a company that still exists. Use the company's own account recovery. We can't reset a company's account for you.
• A wallet file and a forgotten password. That's the work we do. Crypto Asset Recovery recovers wallet passwords from the encrypted wallet file, testing your best guesses and their variations on offline, air-gapped machines. You only pay if we succeed.
• A recovery phrase with missing or wrong words. We rebuild incomplete phrases too.
• A wallet that belonged to someone who has died. Read our guide to recovering a family member's crypto.

Start your recovery →

Password recovery works from the encrypted wallet file and your password guesses. If you'd rather not share every password you've ever used, you can share close variants or only the ones you think are relevant. That lowers the odds, but it's your call.

Why Choose Crypto Asset Recovery?

• Secure, offline recovery. Your encrypted file comes to us over the internet, but the cracking runs on offline, air-gapped machines, so your keys are never exposed online.
• Thousands of wallets recovered, from Bitcoin Core and MultiBit files to Blockchain.com, MetaMask and Trust Wallet.
• Success-based pricing. You only pay if we get you back in.
• Talk to a real person. We're a registered New Hampshire company, and you can get on a Zoom with our founders, the father-and-son team Chris and Charles.
• Featured in BBC, Forbes, Vice, The Block, and Business Insider.

Frequently asked questions

Can I find my Bitcoin wallet with my email address? Not directly. Bitcoin doesn't link wallets to email addresses, so there's nothing to look up. Instead, search your old inboxes for welcome emails, backups and receipts from wallet services, which usually tell you where you made the wallet. If it was an early Blockchain.info wallet, Blockchain.com's login flow can send you the Wallet IDs linked to your email address.

How do I find out if I own any Bitcoin? Search your email for exchange and wallet emails, check old bank statements for payments to exchanges, and look on your old computers for wallet files like wallet.dat. If you find a Bitcoin address, a block explorer will show whether it holds a balance.

How can I find Bitcoin on an old hard drive? Connect the drive to a working computer and search it for wallet files such as wallet.dat, default_wallet, .key files or wallet.aes.json, starting with the old user's profile folders. Copy anything you find before opening it, and keep the original drive safe.

If I know my Bitcoin address, can I tell which wallet created it? No. Wallets create addresses the same way, so an address doesn't reveal the wallet behind it. The address format can hint at the era (bc1 addresses appeared from 2017), and a block explorer will show the balance.

What if the wallet site I used has shut down? It depends on who held the keys. If the company held your coins, as Mt. Gox did, the coins went with it. If you held the keys yourself through a file or recovery phrase, the wallet still works in compatible software even though the company is gone.

Is it safe to send you my wallet file? We're a registered New Hampshire company with public founders you can talk to on Zoom. We work only from the encrypted file and your password guesses, and that alone can't move your funds. We operate in the open, so stealing from a client would end our business.

How long does recovery take? Anywhere from 20 or 30 minutes to, in our longest case, more than two years. Most of that time is passive: you send the encrypted wallet and your guesses, we run them, and we come back to you when we need fresh ideas.