Social Recovery

A smart account nominates guardians who can collectively replace its signing key if the owner loses access. Guardians do not hold funds and cannot move them. Their only power is to rotate the key, usually behind a mandatory delay during which the existing owner can cancel the attempt.

That delay is the mechanism that makes the design work. It converts guardian collusion from a silent theft into a visible attempt with a cancellation window, which is a materially different risk than handing someone a copy of the key. Guardians can be family members, a second device, an institution, or a mix, and the useful configurations avoid a single social cluster that one coordinated approach could capture.

Social recovery is the closest thing self-custody has to a durable answer for incapacity, which is the scenario the seed-phrase model handles worst. A stroke, dementia, or an accident leaves an account permanently frozen under a pure key model and recoverable under this one. It requires a smart account rather than a standard externally owned account, so it is usually a decision made at wallet setup. EIP-7702, live since the May 2025 Pectra upgrade, lets an existing account delegate to smart contract code, which opens some room to retrofit, but a standard account on its own has no recovery path.