Electrum · Forgotten password
I forgot my Electrum password: where to start
Electrum has been around since 2011, and for recovery that is good news: older wallets carry lighter protection than today’s, so testing passwords against an Electrum file is far faster than against a modern wallet. The hard part is almost never the computer — it’s remembering.
Electrum’s two passwords
Electrum can ask you for a password for two different reasons, and it is worth knowing which is yours, because they do not mean the same thing.
- To open the wallet file. The whole file is locked. Without the password you can’t even see the balance.
- To sign a payment. The file opens and you can see your balance, but the moment you try to send it asks for the password. Here what is protected are the keys, not the file.
If yours is the second case — you can see the balance but can’t move anything — you have an advantage: you can check risk-free that the money is still there, and you can show one of your addresses to prove the wallet is yours, which is exactly what is needed to start.
The file you must not lose
Electrum stores each wallet in a file, usually called default_wallet, inside a folder named electrum in your user directory. That file is your wallet. If you delete it and don’t have the seed written down, there is nothing to recover: no copy exists on any server.
An Electrum seed is not an ordinary phrase
This is the detail that surprises many people and explains half the «my phrase doesn’t work» messages. Electrum never used the standard word system that MetaMask, Trust Wallet or Ledger use. It has its own, with a different word list.
- An Electrum seed usually will not work if you type it into another wallet, and that does not mean it is wrong.
- A standard twelve-word phrase can usually be imported into Electrum by ticking the right option.
- If it says «not a valid seed», in many cases the problem is that you are using the wrong type of phrase, not that you copied it wrong.
What makes your case workable
| What you have | What can be done |
|---|---|
| The seed written down | You restore it yourself, free, on any computer |
| The file, and you remember fragments of the password | This is the typical case and it usually works out |
| The file and no memory at all | Very hard; depends on the length |
| Neither file nor seed | Nothing can be done |
Concrete things worth checking
- Look for other copies of the wallet on your computer: many people copied it to USB sticks or cloud folders and forgot.
- Check whether you have older versions of the file. A copy from years ago may carry a simpler password you have forgotten you used.
- Write down everything you remember about the password without filtering: roughly how many characters, whether it started with a capital, whether it had a year or a phone number in it. That list is what decides the case.