MultiBit wallet recovery: getting Bitcoin out of MultiBit Classic and MultiBit HD

Never paste your password or upload your .wallet/.key file to a website or a “MultiBit recovery tool” you found on Google. The extraction below happens entirely on a computer you control.

Which MultiBit do you have?

• MultiBit Classic — files end in .wallet and .key. Each address has its own private key in the file.
• MultiBit HD — folder named after your wallet (e.g. mbhd-xxxx) containing mbhd.wallet.aes. All addresses derive from a 12-word BIP32 seed.

If you have the MultiBit HD 12-word seed

You don’t need MultiBit at all. The seed is BIP32 but uses a non-standard derivation path (m/0'/0/i), which is why importing it into Electrum or a hardware wallet often shows a zero balance. The reliable path:

1. Open Electrum, choose “Standard wallet” → “I already have a seed”.
2. Paste the 12 words, click the gear icon, enable “BIP39 seed” and set the derivation path to m/0'/0.
3. Let Electrum scan. If it still shows zero, try the path m/44'/0'/0'.
4. Confirm balances against mempool.space, then send a small test transaction before sweeping the rest.

If you have a MultiBit Classic .wallet file

MultiBit Classic stored private keys directly inside the .wallet file (Google Protocol Buffers format, encrypted with your spending password). The modern playbook:

1. Copy the entire MultiBit data folder to a safe offline location. Never edit the originals.
2. On an offline machine, use a maintained open-source extractor (e.g. btcrecover’s extract tool) to pull the encrypted key blob out of the .wallet file.
3. If you remember the spending password, decrypt the keys and import them into Electrum as a “private key” wallet.
4. If you don’t remember the password but have a rough idea (length, words, character classes), btcrecover can try variations against the extracted blob — this is the password-guessing step that’s safe to run offline.
5. Once decrypted, sweep the imported keys into a new wallet on a hardware device.

When this stops being a DIY job

Most MultiBit cases that reach us aren’t clean. They look like this:

• A MultiBit HD seed that’s valid BIP39 but shows no balance on any path you’ve tried.
• A .wallet file with a password you “almost” remember — you know the rough length and theme but not the exact characters.
• Only a partial backup — a screenshot of a few addresses, no .wallet file.
• An old hard drive image with a MultiBit install but no obvious wallet folder.

We’ve recovered hundreds of MultiBit wallets in scenarios like these. The work is mostly intelligent password searching, derivation-path sweeps, and forensic extraction from old disk images. You keep control of the keys throughout. No upfront fees, ever.