What is walletgen?

WalletGen is a C++ program for generating and testing Bitcoin and Ethereum style crypto wallets in bulk, aimed at recovering wallets whose seed phrases are partly known or lost, and at searching for wallets that already hold a balance. It builds wallets using the same standards real wallets use, called BIP39, BIP44, and Bech32 for Bitcoin, and Keccak256 hashing for Ethereum and other EVM based chains such as BNB and MATIC. Because it is written in C++ rather than Python and can use multiple CPU threads and the graphics card, the README claims it runs far faster than typical brute force scripts. The tool works two ways. First, it can recover a wallet you already own if you know most of a twelve word seed phrase but are missing one or more words: you replace the missing words with an asterisk, and WalletGen tries every possible combination until it finds one that matches a real wallet. Second, it can generate large numbers of random seed phrases and check whether any of them happen to correspond to a wallet that currently holds funds, either by querying blockchain explorers live over the internet or by comparing against a bundled database of known addresses with balances, which is faster because it avoids network lookups. When it finds a wallet with a balance, it stops, prints the details, and saves them to a text file so the seed phrase can be imported into a normal wallet app like Metamask, Trust Wallet, or Electrum. Prebuilt downloads are offered for Windows, macOS, and Linux, and Linux users are also given a tar.gz they can extract and run directly. Building from source requires a C++ compiler and a Makefile. The README notes it does not need an internet connection when searching against its bundled address database, only when checking balances live through blockchain explorers.