A wallet.dat on a drive that died. A keystore deleted during a tidy-up. Coins bought in 2013 on a laptop that has sat in the loft ever since. Cryptocurrency recovery is real, valuable work — and a field crowded with magical promises. Our own bench does the recoverable cases properly and names the impossible ones for free, because with money at stake, honesty is the service.
$ ldr manage-bde -status → Device: Lenovo laptop SSD → Status: BITLOCKER — won't unlock → Client: confidential · Sheffield $ ldr engineer-working → Recovery key: located in account → Volume: unlocked with key → Imaging: 100% · clean $ ldr verify → ✓ work_files — recovered → ✓ key found — not cracked → ✓ drive — back
Wallet jobs succeed when the cryptographic material still exists somewhere physical: wallet files on failed drives — wallet.dat, keystore JSONs, app data folders — recovered through standard drive work with the search tuned to wallet signatures; deleted wallet files, racing overwrites like any deletion but with file-carving that knows exactly what wallet structures look like; old machines and media archaeologically searched for wallets you owned before the coins mattered; and corrupted wallet files structurally repaired to the point their keys extract. Passphrase-protected finds stay protected — the file returns, your passphrase opens it — and hardware wallets are their own conversation, since seed phrases, not devices, are usually the real question.
No seed phrase, no private key, no wallet file surviving anywhere — then no recovery, from us or from anyone else. The mathematics that make the coins yours make them exactly that unrecoverable without the keys. Likewise a forgotten strong passphrase on an intact wallet (brute force against modern KDFs is theatre, sold by the hour), and drives whose relevant sectors are genuinely overwritten. We say this on the page because desperate people are this field’s prey: any ‘recovery service’ asking for payment before honestly assessing whether your key material can exist should be treated as the risk it is. Our diagnostic answers that existence question first, free — then the fixed quote covers only work with a real chance.
Often, genuinely, yes. Pre-2016 machines with intact drives are the happy hunting ground here, and a wallet-signature search is methodical rather than speculative. Send the drive (or the machine), list every wallet software name you half-remember, and the diagnostic reports what exists before any recovery is quoted.
The engineering is exactly the same as any clicking drive — image first, gently, weak areas last — but the search inside that image is wallet-tuned. What the value should change is your urgency about retries: stop powering it. And our pricing stays bench-priced; we don't charge percentages of what's inside.
Realistically, no. Modern wallet encryption defeats brute force by design, and anyone selling you infinite attempts is selling hope by the hour. If you have a shortlist of likely passphrases, targeted testing is honest work we can discuss; a true blank is a true blank, and we'll say so free.