KEY RECOVERY
Lose the device. Keep the records.
A few of the people and institutions you already chose can put your key back together. No single one of them can do it alone, and we never hold a copy of anything.
0
COPIES HELD BY US
N of M
PARTIES REQUIRED
MPC
MULTI-PARTY COMPUTATION
LOCKED-OUT USERS
Holding your own keys
removed the middleman
and the safety net with it.
Holding your own keys means nobody can seize your records. It also means nobody can help you the day the laptop dies, and for most people that trade has never been worth making.
15-20%
PERMANENTLY LOSE ACCESS
1
DEVICE BETWEEN YOU AND NOTHING
0
PEOPLE TO APPEAL TO
THE TRADE NOBODY ACCEPTED
A seed phrase isn't a product.
Existing self-custody asks an ordinary person to protect a string of words forever, with no reset, no support line and no second chance. A meaningful share of people lose access permanently, and that's a design outcome rather than user error.
Apple, Google and Microsoft spent the last few years teaching more than a billion people that logging in means a fingerprint and that a lost device is an inconvenience rather than an erasure. Measured against that, an unrecoverable key isn't a security feature. It's an unfinished product.
WHY INSTITUTIONS WALK AWAY
No registrar signs up for permanent loss.
A university can't tell a graduate that their transcript is gone because they changed phones. A hospital can't tell a patient the same about their records. Neither can underwrite that operational risk, which is why high value records have stayed on centralized servers breaches and all.
WHAT'S ACTUALLY NEEDED
THE MECHANISM
Recovery without custody.
Your key is never stored anywhere whole. Instead, parties who have already verified who you are hold shares of the means to reconstruct it, and a threshold of them working together can restore your access.
Because it takes several independent parties, there's nobody who can be pressured, bribed or subpoenaed into handing over your account on their own. That's the difference between recovery and a back door.
WHY IT MATTERS
This is what unlocks everyone else.
Institutions wouldn't put real records on a system where a lost phone means permanent loss, and ordinary people wouldn't use one either. Recovery isn't a convenience feature bolted on at the end. It's the thing that makes the rest adoptable.
HOW IT DIFFERS
