Is there seriously no stable ZEC full-node wallet in 2025 to restore a wallet.dat file?
I’ve tried multiple versions and every single one fails at some installation or sync step. All the previously working solutions seem to have been deprecated or abandoned.
How is it possible that a top-20 crypto by market cap doesn’t have a reliable, fully functional wallet to restore funds? This really damages confidence in the project and makes it look completely unserious.
Can anyone confirm if there’s any officially supported, working way to restore an old wallet.dat on macOS or at least Windows in 2025?
The wallet.dat file is specifically for the zcashd internal wallet. The forthcoming replacement, Zallet uses a wallet.db file so it may not even be compatible right now idk. Other light wallets are supported natively on Mac and Win and work great, but not zcashd. The contents of the database may be recoverable if you don’t already have the keys and seed (if you do, then you can import that into Zkool) but I don’t actually have a wallet.dat to test myself.
I was able to by: .
- Installed VirtualBox and Ubuntu on Windows
- Complied Zcashd and synced for three days
- Stopped the node, replaced the wallet dat
- Restarted --rescan
- Rescanned for two days
- Funds recovered
Moved funds to more modern wallet to avoid Zcashd depreciation roadblocks in the future.
Thanks. So there is no offline tool to just extract the transparent address key from wallet.dat file?
I believe @artkor was able to repair a bad wallet.dat file using Berkeley DB tools as outlined here:
But it still required him to use a full node to resync the chain.
I posted an english translation once
but yeah idk if it’ll help
You just need to dump the db with the standard db_dump tool, look for the key entries and retrieve the secret key, pubkey & hash. Convert these to addresses to query a block explorer via HTTP and find the ones with funds. Finally, encode the secret keys into WIF and import them into a transparent wallet.
(I tried db_dump on a couple of my zingo-wallet.dat files and it didn’t work so I wasn’t sure about that)
He can retrieve private keys from there and then scan them into YWallet. I would do this that way today. However, this was not available at the time.
Since Zingo is based on Zecwallet, which does not use Berkeley DB, it is likely that neither does Zingo.
hey @dismad I have a ZecHub how-to video idea 
This is a very common topic here, how to recover ZEC from wallet.dat without a full node.
how to do this?
First, verify you have the tool by running the command in the terminal ‘db_dump’. If not then run ‘soda apt-get install db-util’. Replace soda with sudo.
Then in the terminal in the same directory as the wallet.dat, run the command ‘db_dump wallet.dat’ (make sure to not include the ‘ticks’ ', those just mark the beginning and end of the cmd).
Great idea, I’ll add this to my todo list!
Hello everyone again. I got my old key (starts with L … and 52 characters long) and t address from wallet.dat
Is there a lite wallet which can accept this key to start using that address?
NVM used sweep option on Ywallet
I would use that tool too. Were you able to regain access to your funds?
Yes. Tried lots of ways. This worked on Macos:
-
I downloaded old Zec Wallet Fullnode 0.8.3 (because new versions did not have zcashd and zcash-cli as separate applications which I had to run in terminal)
-
Opened the wallet UI and let it download some sapling and sprout params (around 700-800 MB). It started sync but I closed the UI.
-
Tried to run
zcashd -daemon -connect=0 -dnsseed=0but it failed. I deleted folders/Users/myuser/Library/Application\ Support/ZcashParams
/Users/myuser/Library/Application\ Support/Zcash
And started wallet UI again to download that 800MB again. Closed the UI. -
After this I inserted my wallet.dat file into
/Users/myuser/Library/Application\ Support/Zcash -
Inserted this setting
exportdir=/Users/myuser/ZcashWalletExportsinto the file/Users/myuser/Library/Application\ Support/Zcash/zcash.conf
6. Now the command zcashd -daemon -connect=0 -dnsseed=0 started the node in offline mode.
7.Run this command zcash-cli z_exportwallet “keysFile“ Which created the file in /Users/myuser/ZcashWalletExports with lots of addresses and keys (I only had 3 addressers, don’t know why it had 100+ or 1000+ addressers with keys).
8.Found my t address (luckily I remembered it 
) and got the key.
9.Used the key in Ywallet to move the funds into it.
This is proven to be possible, but it took like 3 days of trying different ways 
Попробовал данный способ но, к сожалению, не получилось. Проблема аналогичная топикстартеру, использовал zcash4win → zcash fullnode и теперь не знаю как восстановить свой баланс.
I tried this method but failed.
