Is there another wallet that can restore from MultiBit's seed words?

Question

We've had a lot of questions revolving around stuck transactions due to apparently non-existent fee estimation and unconfirmed balance bugs on MultiBit in the past weeks. Some get resolved by using the "Repair wallet function", others successfully recovered their wallet by installing MultiBit on another device and restoring from the seed words.

As MultiBit appears to continue to have issues even months after first reports, I would like to be able to recommend another wallet that can simply recover the funds from MultiBit's seed words.

• What other wallets can recover the wallet from MultiBit's seed words?

^{(If this is different between MultiBit HD and MultiBit Classic, please be specific in your answer.)}

Answer 1

As far as I know, no wallet uses the same derivation path as Multibit HD so a Multibit HD wallet cannot be restored to another wallet. However, using a site like https://iancoleman.github.io/bip39/, you can get the private keys for your addresses and import them into another wallet.

To use https://iancoleman.github.io/bip39/ to get your keys, first download the page and run it locally, don't actually use the website. See the Offline Usage section of the page for instructions to get it offline. Once the page is loaded into your browser offline, enter your Multibit HD wallet words into the box labeled "BIP 39 Mnemonic". Then scroll down and choose the tab labeled "BIP 32". Click the dropdown box labeled "Client" and choose the "Multibit HD" option. Scroll down to the section labeled "Derived addresses".

These addresses are all of the addresses that belong to your Multibit HD wallet. You can increase the number of addresses generated so that you actually get all of the addresses that you have used. The private keys are available in the rightmost column. You can then import/sweep those private keys into another wallet.

Answer 2

Along the lines of Andrew Chow's answer, I made an offline tool for deriving bip32 private keys and related info from seed words. It might be helpful for somebody in this situation. The tool is hd-wallet-derive.