Ethereum presale wallet recovery
Bought Ether in the 2014 presale and can’t open the wallet a decade later? The encrypted presale file still holds your key — and we know the encoding traps that make a correct password fail.
The Ethereum presale ran in the summer of 2014, months before the network launched, and buyers received their Ether inside a small encrypted file rather than any online account. Ten years on, that file is often all someone has left — and a forgotten password makes it feel sealed shut. It usually isn’t. Ethereum presale wallet recovery is possible whenever you still hold the file, because everything needed to unlock it lives inside it plus your memory of the password.
What a 2014 presale wallet is
A presale wallet is a JSON file, commonly named ethereum_wallet_backup.json. Open it in a text editor and you’ll see a handful of fields — an encseed (your encrypted seed), an ethaddr (your Ethereum address), and usually the email and BTC address you used at purchase. The encseed is the part that matters: your chosen password is stretched with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 over 2,000 iterations and used to decrypt it with AES-128-CBC.
There is no server, no reset, and no support desk — by design. That is exactly why the file plus your password is the whole game, and why holding the original JSON is non-negotiable for recovery.
What you need to recover it
- The presale JSON file with the encseed field. Without it, no one can recover the wallet.
- Anything you remember about the password — length, language, words or numbers you used, whether it had special or accented characters.
- The context from 2014 — the computer, operating system and keyboard you set it up on, and whether you pasted the password from a manager like LastPass. This matters more than people expect, for reasons in the encoding section below.
How presale password recovery works
Your password is never stored; it only derives the key that decrypts the encseed. Recovery is therefore a search for that password, and the seed is never attacked directly. We extract the hash from the JSON and run a hint-driven search on GPUs using hashcat’s dedicated presale mode (16300), building candidate lists from what you remember rather than brute-forcing an astronomically large space. The moment a candidate decrypts the encseed and derives your known ethaddr, the password is confirmed — unambiguously.
The 2,000-iteration PBKDF2 is light by modern standards, so throughput is high; the real constraint is the size of the search space, which is precisely why good hints turn a hopeless case into a solvable one.
Why a “correct” presale password fails — the part that wins cases
Presale wallets are notorious for a maddening situation: you type the password you are certain is right, and the wallet stays shut. The password usually is right — the bytes are not. Because the key is derived from the exact bytes of your password, an invisible difference in how a character is encoded produces a completely different key. The common culprits:
- UTF-8 vs Latin-1. A password with an umlaut (ä, ö, ü), an accent or the £/€ sign was often stored in one byte encoding at creation and is produced in another when you type it today. The letters look identical; the bytes differ.
- Unicode normalisation (NFC vs NFKD). An accented character can be a single code point or a letter plus a combining mark — visually the same, cryptographically different.
- Keyboard layout. A password created on a German, French or other layout and re-typed on a US layout can silently swap characters like y/z or special symbols.
- Password managers and browser autofill. Pasting from LastPass or a browser in 2014 could introduce a trailing character or a different encoding than typing it by hand does now.
We reproduce each of these encoding forks and sweep them against your file. This is the single most common reason a presale wallet that “can’t be wrong” is recovered — and it’s where our years of presale-specific work show up. Tell us the language and keyboard you used; it narrows the forks dramatically.
What we can’t do — honestly
If the presale JSON file itself is lost, there is nothing to decrypt and the wallet cannot be recovered by anyone. If you genuinely remember nothing about a long, fully random password, the search space may be too large to be feasible, and we’ll tell you that rather than take the case. We also never ask for payment upfront, and no legitimate service can “recover” presale Ether that was sent away or never in your file — treat any such offer as a scam.
Frequently asked questions
Can you recover a 2014 Ethereum presale wallet?
Yes, if you still have the presale JSON file with the encseed field and some memory of the password. We search password candidates against the file with GPU tooling; the seed itself is never brute-forced. If the file is gone, recovery is not possible.
My presale password is definitely correct but it will not decrypt. Why?
Almost always a text-encoding mismatch. A special or accented character was stored in one encoding when you created the wallet and is produced differently when you type it now (UTF-8 vs Latin-1, or a Unicode normalisation difference), so the exact password no longer matches. We reproduce those encodings systematically, which is where most presale cases are won.
What file do you need for presale recovery?
The presale wallet JSON, often named ethereum_wallet_backup.json, containing an encseed field and your Ethereum address (ethaddr). That file plus a hint about the password is all we need to start.
I only remember part of my presale password. Is that enough?
Often, yes. The length, any fragments, the language and the keyboard you used in 2014 let us build a targeted search instead of brute-forcing an enormous space.
How much does presale recovery cost?
Success-based: a percentage of the recovered value only if we succeed, and nothing if we fail. We never ask for upfront payment.
Locked out of your presale wallet?
Send us the presale JSON and what you remember of the password — especially the language and keyboard you used. Honest assessment within 24 hours, and you pay only on success.