Blockstream Green is a highly respected wallet application – available on Windows, Mac, and Linux – that is primarily used to store Bitcoin and assets on the Liquid Network. Because it has been around for years, many early adopters used it to secure their coins. Now, they may not know where their wallet data is stored.
If you find yourself in this situation today, you might be sitting on a significant amount of Bitcoin without knowing how to access it. Fortunately, if you still have the computer you used back then, there is a chance you can recover your funds. You generally have two options: you can search for your wallet files manually or use an automated tool to do the work for you.
The manual way
To find Blockstream Green files manually, you need to search your computer for the JSON files that store your wallet
information. These files are not always easy to spot because their names are typically a string of random characters,
such as 87e04bf7-4ba7-4d97-8d62-04c3379f4bd5.
Your best bet is to search your hard drive for a folder named wallets or wallets2. Inside it, you should find the
wallet JSON files. Their contents should look like this:
1{
2 "hash_id": "41ac692605db347d466efd5a8315e4dadc517a38a23b4d8b16525177df2c07d3",
3 "login_attempts_remaining": 3,
4 "name": "My Bitcoin Wallet",
5 "network": "electrum-mainnet",
6 "version": 1
7}
If you used the mobile version of Blockstream Green, recovery is much more difficult. You would need to jailbreak your phone to access its internal filesystem, which is a complex, risky process that varies by model and voids your warranty.
Regardless of whether you used the desktop or mobile version of Blockstream Green, finding your seed phrase is often the
most direct path to recovering your Bitcoin and Liquid Network assets. This phrase, also known as a recovery phrase or
mnemonic phrase, was normally given to you when you first created your wallet. It looks like a series of 12 to 24
random words, for example shove tank snack toward produce knock battle garbage buzz smart match father mammal twice rule
swing exit pitch any wheat love term oyster reform.
To find your seed phrase, you can search your hard drive for files containing common crypto keywords like seed phrase,
backup phrase, mnemonic phrase or simply look for lists of words that seem out of place. If you do locate your phrase,
you can easily import it into a fresh installation of Blockstream Green or any other compatible wallet software to
instantly regain access to your funds.
The automatic way
While the manual approach is a good starting point, it has plenty of failings. It is incredibly time-consuming to scour every directory, and it is very easy to miss a single JSON file among the hundreds of thousands of files on a modern hard drive. Furthermore, the manual way often fails if:
- You used an older version of Blockstream Green that stored data differently.
- You renamed or moved your wallet files in an attempt to hide them.
- You need to check multiple computers or old external drives.
This is why I created Treasure Hunter, so you don’t have to do the tedious searching. My software is designed to detect wallet files and seed phrases even if they have been hidden or moved around.
Treasure Hunter works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and can scan a wide variety of storage devices, including HDDs, SSDs, USB keys, SD cards, and even optical media like CDs and DVDs. The best part? You can scan your storage devices for free!