Social Recovery — Mr. Brainer with no guardians
Once upon a time, there lived a legend named Mr. Brainer. He was the prodigy of his time: the one who remembers everything. Devoting all his time to mastering the art of remembering everything, he isolated himself from the social world and was left with no friends and guardians. After all this, he decided to capture all the flags of the crypto world on a bullish crypto eve. Before he starts his journey, he decides to build a sword and shield with the cryptic magic of a 12-word seed phrase that is strong 💪🏼 and secure 🔐. After building his sword, he was ready for the crypto world journey and not to mention the power he possessed: “Remembers everything.” He was the only one who knew the 12-word seed phrase magic.
Finally, he started with Quest Island 🏝 to get some training and to forte the art of capturing cryptic flags ⛳️. As the day passes, he collects flags from airdrop city, NFT swapping Island, Staking country, Traders village, and many more. Finally, the bullish eve also got ecstasize, filled with many crypto treasury flags that he stored in his cryptic 12 words seed phrase tool, and he was the only one who could access it. You already know where this story is heading, and yes, you guessed it right. After capturing all the flags, he got hit by an elongated bear (pun intended), and because of that, he lost the ability to remember everything, or we can say amnesia got in his skin.
Till today, the crypto treasure is locked in his 12-word seed phrase, but nobody knows how to access it (We need a Thor of this world to lift it.). That, for sure, left us with a question — What if he had guardians who could have helped him to remember that 12-word seed phrase?
But a few of his followers created a better spell to create a sword/shield and named that — “Account abstraction with Social recovery. “
The story concludes that even Mr. Brainer can’t recover his crypto assets, so we need better wallet recovery methods. Let’s get acquainted with the same. 😎
Before I start sharing ample stories that state the loss of private keys and the value they hold. I don’t think we need to stress the idea of securing private keys or losing the private key is uncommon. So, you have guessed by now that social recovery is the ability to recover the signing key through which funds can be accessed even in the event one lost it.
Note: This blog is focused on the basics of social recovery and will be one of the initial parts of upcoming advanced blogs.
Social recovery being a part of the wallet, we need to understand the types of accounts on Ethereum:
- Externally Owned Accounts (EOA)
- Contract Accounts (CA).
In elementary words, EOAs are controlled by Private keys, and CA are controlled by code (Smart contract). To know more about this, please refer to this link.
Now taking a step by step, we understand that wallet loss or theft is common, and it would be unfair to say we haven’t tried anything to prevent it. The commonly used ways to secure or store crypto assets are:
- Paper wallet
- Hardware wallet
- Multi-Sig wallet
Although all of them have suffered from different defects in the past; sometimes it can be providing less protection, vulnerability, or lead to bad user experience. Undoubtedly, Multi-Sig is the preferred choice, but still, the user experience of signing the txs is a bit time-consuming, given you have the sign transaction by X keys among Y, where X <= Y.
So while enabling social recovery as a solution. We can continue with using the single key as a “signer” for the transactions, but to keep it safe, it will have a set of guardians that, after reaching a consensus, can change the signing key of the account. It is recommended to have at least 3 guardians (different wallets, that can be used to change the signer), more the merrier. You don’t need to make your friends or family the guardians, you can always split few guardians at various place that you own like different laptop, mobile, or even paper wallet. In top of that to have a better user experience, they need not install any separate application, it can be signed with their native wallets.
Signing key also have the capabilities to change the guardian any given point in time but after a delay of some days, to increase the security. Also, after a certain threshold of funds amount, signing from guardians will also be required to prevent wallet from significant attack. The idea is to make recovery possible in all the scenarios and minimise the risk of thefts, do you have any ideas that can be implemented in this use case?
This shows us that social recovery optimized the case of losing of the signing key. While in the scenario of securing the funds from theft, one of the concepts proposed by Vitalik — vault can be implemented. On the top of that, funds can be transferred automatically to the vault after a certain threshold.
But, as of now, do any wallets supports social recovery. So, to answer that loopring and argent are two major wallets that support the same.
Conclusion and what next:
We understand that through social recovery, signing key recovery is possible by including multiple guardians and also eases the user experience by signing in the same way as we do.
In the upcoming blogs, we will talk more about account abstractions, layer 2, setup of social recovery wallets. Do let me know if you want me to write about something specific.
