Can I recover a wallet if I lost my entire seed phrase?

No. If every word is gone and you have no other backup (no keystore file, no hardware wallet, no exported private key), the funds are unrecoverable by design. Recovery is only possible when you still hold most of the phrase — a missing word or two, a typo, or the wrong order.

How many missing words can realistically be recovered?

One unknown word is trivial and instant. Two is feasible, especially if you know a receive address to confirm against. Three or more grows into billions of combinations and is usually impractical without extra clues like the wallet's address.

Is it safe to use an online seed phrase recovery tool?

Only if it runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing to a server. Our tool is open-source and computes everything locally in WebAssembly. For maximum safety, use it on an offline device and move funds to a fresh wallet afterward.

Do I need to know one of my wallet addresses?

It helps enormously. When several candidate phrases pass the checksum, a known receive address pinpoints the exact one. The tool auto-detects whether it is a Bitcoin or Ethereum address and checks the first receive addresses for a match.

How to Recover a Lost or Incomplete Seed Phrase

Losing access to a wallet is stressful — but a lost seed phrase and an incomplete one are very different situations. If you still have most of your words, recovery is often a matter of arithmetic, not luck. This guide walks through exactly what is recoverable, what is not, and how to do it safely.

Use the free, offline tool. Everything below can be done on the Seed Phrase Recovery homepage — it runs 100% in your browser and never sends your words anywhere.

First, a safety word

Before anything else: never give your seed phrase to a person, a website that sends it to a server, or a "recovery service" that asks for a fee. Legitimate support — from any wallet, ever — will never ask for your recovery phrase. Most "I can recover your wallet" offers are theft. The only safe recovery is one you run yourself, on a tool you can inspect, ideally offline.

When you finish recovering, treat the phrase as compromised if you typed it on an internet-connected machine: move the funds to a brand-new wallet.

What can actually be recovered

A BIP39 seed phrase is not a random list of words — it is structured data with a built-in checksum. A 12-word phrase encodes 128 bits of entropy plus a 4-bit checksum; a 24-word phrase encodes 256 bits plus an 8-bit checksum. That checksum is what makes recovery possible: most wrong guesses fail it instantly, so the search collapses to a tiny set of valid candidates.

You can recover from:

A missing word (you know 11 of 12, or 23 of 24).
A misspelled or non-BIP39 word (a typo that isn't on the wordlist).
Words in the wrong order (you have all of them, but jumbled).
An "invalid" phrase that won't import (usually one of the above).

You cannot recover from nothing. If the whole phrase is gone and you kept no other backup, the cryptography that protects your coins from attackers also protects them from you.

The recovery workflow

1. Write down everything you do know

Open the recovery tool and pick your phrase length (12, 15, 18, 21, or 24). Fill in every word you're sure of. Leave blanks for unknown words — you can mark a slot unknown by leaving it empty. If you have the whole phrase but doubt the order, use the "recover word order" option instead.

2. Add your safety nets

Typos: enable fuzzy matching so words that aren't on the BIP39 list expand to their closest valid neighbours.
Passphrase: if you used a BIP39 passphrase (a "25th word"), enter it. Without it you'll derive a different, empty wallet. See BIP39 passphrase explained.
A known address: paste any receive address from the wallet. This is the single most powerful clue — it turns "hundreds of valid-looking phrases" into "the one that's actually yours."

3. Run it and confirm

The tool tries every combination, keeps only the ones whose checksum is valid, and — if you provided an address — derives addresses for each candidate and stops when one matches. A confirmed match is your phrase. Without an address, you'll get a list of checksum-valid candidates to try in your wallet.

Match it to the right wallet type

The same seed phrase produces different addresses depending on the derivation path. Bitcoin alone has three common formats — Legacy (1…), SegWit (3…), and Native SegWit (bc1…) — and Ethereum uses its own path. If a recovered phrase looks valid but shows an unfamiliar address, you may simply be looking at the wrong account type. The tool derives all of them so you can compare.

Scenario guides

Each common situation has its own walkthrough:

When to stop and get perspective

If you have three or more fully unknown words and no address to match against, the search space can reach billions of combinations. That doesn't always mean it's hopeless — but it does mean you should gather more clues (an old address, a transaction ID, a partial backup) before brute-forcing. A few extra known characters can shrink the problem from years to seconds.

Recovery is often more possible than it feels in the first panicked hour. Start with what you know, work offline, trust no one with your words, and let the checksum do the heavy lifting.

Ready? Open the recovery tool →