Social Recovery

Social recovery replaces the lone seed phrase with a circle of trusted people or devices: lose access, and a threshold of your "guardians" (friends, family

Social recovery replaces the lone seed phrase with a circle of trusted people or devices: lose access, and a threshold of your “guardians” (friends, family, a second device) together authorize a new key. No single guardian can steal anything alone.

Why it matters

Seed phrases fail ordinary humans — lost paper ends ownership permanently. Social recovery trades cryptographic purity for human reality: keys you can actually recover, at the cost of trusting your circle not to collude. Done with widely separated, non-communicating guardians, it’s the most promising path to mass self-custody that doesn’t end in tears.

Related terms

wallet · multisig ·
seed phrase

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