Recovery guide · Software wallets

Exodus recovery: from missing words to corrupted backups

Exodus stores your funds behind a 12-word BIP39 phrase plus, on desktop, an encrypted local vault. The wallet itself is just a UI — your coins live on the blockchain. That means recovery almost always comes down to either reconstructing the 12 words or unlocking the desktop vault.

You have all 12 words

Install a fresh copy of Exodus, choose "Restore Wallet", and enter the phrase. If you'd rather not depend on Exodus, the same seed restores into Electrum (BTC), MetaMask (ETH and ERC-20s), and any BIP39-compatible wallet. Exodus uses standard BIP44 derivation paths.

You have the desktop vault but not the words

Exodus stores your encrypted seed in exodus.wallet/under your user profile (look for seed.seco and related files). With the original password, restoring is instant. With a forgotten or partially remembered password, targeted GPU-based decryption can usually recover funds provided you remember the structure of what you typed — first letter, length, the years you used it, the substitutions you tend to make.

The 12 words are incomplete or out of order

• 11 of 12 words known — the missing word can be solved deterministically using the BIP39 checksum.
• All 12 words but the checksum fails — one or two words are likely transcription errors; a targeted search over phonetically similar words usually finds the fix.
• Words known, order uncertain — bounded permutation search across plausible orderings works when the entropy is small enough.

The Exodus app won't open or shows zero balance

An app that won't launch is almost always a corrupted local database, not a lost wallet. Back up the entireexodus.wallet folder before doing anything else. A zero-balance restore usually means a wrong seed entered somewhere — verify each word against the BIP39 wordlist before assuming the funds are gone.