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Social Recovery

Social Recovery is a method for users to regain access to their crypto wallet while remaining fully self-custodial. Social Recovery feature allows you to recover your wallet with the support of your trusted guardians.

This article will explain in detail the definition of social recovery and how it works in W3Smart Wallet?

What is Social Recovery?​

Social recovery is a way to recover your self-custodial wallet without using seed phrases. While with a custodial wallet, a third party keeps your private key, a self-custodial one allows you to have full control over your assets. This also means that once you lose your key (in the form of seed phrase), you lose access to your assets.

Social recovery is a method for users to rely on a group of trusted friends to recover your assets. Essentially, instead of relying solely on a private key or seed phrase to regain access to a wallet, a user can delegate this responsibility to a group of trusted individuals.

How Social Recovery works in W3Smart Wallet?​

W3Smart Wallet allows users to rely on guardians to recover their passcode. In W3Smart Wallet, forgetting your passcode basically means you will lose access to your funds, you cannot transfer them out of your wallet, or use them in any transactions.

In this unfortunate case, you can rely on your guardians to regain control over your account. The majority of guardians signatures are needed to recover your wallet. This ensures that if there is an attacker having access to your wallet, they can never gain your passcode without alerting guardians.

Additionally, we also set up a security period (36h) after all your guardians sign transactions before the recovery request is executed. W3Smart Wallet requires you to wait a 36-hour period so that you can take preventive action if you make a mistake, or there is an attack on your wallet. We make sure to support you with a failsafe mechanism to cancel. Read details here.

Why is Social Recovery important?​

Of the utmost importance when it comes to holding crypto assets:

  • Prevent malicious attacks - no outsiders can gain control over your funds: your passcode is only recovered as long as there are enough signatures from your trusted guardians.
  • Minimize the risks of losing access to your crypto wallet: the main issue with other non-custodial wallets is that because you are fully in charge of your asset, losing your private key means you totally lose your access. Social Recovery comes into rescue by allowing you to recover your passcode relying solely on your trusted guardians. They don’t have access to your funds, but they can help you recover it.
  • Reduce reliance on centralized service: Centralized service has your private key, and who can trust a third party with your million-dollar asset anyway.

Conclusion​

Social Recovery solves the Web 3 dilemma: non-custodial and irrecoverable without keeping seed phrases. Or in other words, security and user experience. W3Smart Wallet is built with a social recovery feature so that users can have the best of both worlds.