Jaxx Liberty Wallet Recovery

Jaxx (later renamed Jaxx Liberty) was one of the first multi-chain mobile and desktop wallets, launched by Anthony Diiorio's Decentral Inc. in 2014. At its peak it held seed phrases for hundreds of thousands of users across BTC, ETH, LTC, DASH, ZEC, and dozens of ERC-20 tokens. In 2021 Decentral pivoted to Jaxx Pro and ultimately discontinued the consumer product. Many users discovered too late that the wallet stopped syncing — but the funds were never moved. They are still on the blockchain, waiting for the seed to be imported into a working wallet.

Two eras: Jaxx Classic vs Jaxx Liberty

Jaxx Classic (2014-2017) had no password. The 12-word seed was stored in plaintext in the local browser-extension or Electron data folder. Anyone with disk access could read it. Jaxx Liberty (2017+) introduced PBKDF2 + AES-256-CBC encryption, but kept the same LevelDB storage layout.

# Jaxx Liberty key derivation (reverse-engineered)
salt        = random(8 bytes)
iterations  = 5000
key         = PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512(password, salt, 5000, 32)
iv          = random(16 bytes)
ciphertext  = AES-256-CBC(key, iv, mnemonic_utf8)

# Stored in LevelDB under the 'wallets' key as base64-encoded JSON:
# { "salt": "...", "iv": "...", "ciphertext": "..." }

Where is the wallet data folder?

Copy the entire folder. Do not delete the LOG or MANIFEST-* files. LevelDB is sensitive to partial copies.

Extracting the encrypted seed blob

# Quick Python extractor using plyvel
import plyvel, json, base64

db = plyvel.DB('./file__0.indexeddb.leveldb', create_if_missing=False)
for k, v in db:
    if b'wallets' in k:
        # Value is wrapped in IndexedDB binary frame; the JSON
        # blob starts after the 0x00 0x01 header bytes.
        try:
            payload = v.split(b'{', 1)[1]
            data = json.loads(b'{' + payload)
            print(json.dumps(data, indent=2))
        except Exception:
            pass
db.close()

The output gives you the salt, IV and ciphertext. Save them to jaxx_vault.json.

Decrypting with the known password

from hashlib import pbkdf2_hmac
from Crypto.Cipher import AES
import base64, json

vault = json.load(open('jaxx_vault.json'))
password = "my-old-jaxx-pass"
salt = base64.b64decode(vault['salt'])
iv   = base64.b64decode(vault['iv'])
ct   = base64.b64decode(vault['ciphertext'])

key = pbkdf2_hmac('sha512', password.encode(), salt, 5000, 32)
cipher = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_CBC, iv)
mnemonic = cipher.decrypt(ct).rstrip(b'\x00').decode()
print(mnemonic)  # 12 BIP39 words

Brute-forcing a forgotten password

# btcrecover Jaxx module (works against either Classic or Liberty)
python3 btcrecover.py \
    --wallet ./file__0.indexeddb.leveldb \
    --wallet-type jaxx \
    --tokenlist tokens.txt \
    --typos 2 --typos-case --typos-swap

Migration target — what wallet to import into

Recoverable vs not

Related guides

• Coinomi recovery — recommended migration target.
• Exodus / Atomic / Trust Wallet — migration alternatives.
• Old Bitcoin wallet checklist — sister guide for legacy BTC wallets.
• btcrecover full tutorial.

Frequently asked questions