Social Recovery

Social recovery is a wallet design that lets you regain access to your funds through a group of trusted parties, called guardians, instead of relying solely on a seed phrase. If you lose your signing device or key, a threshold of your guardians, for example 3 of 5, can jointly authorize assigning a new key to your wallet, restoring your control without any of them ever being able to spend your money individually.

The approach is mainly implemented in smart contract wallets on Ethereum and similar chains, and it gained momentum alongside account abstraction. For example, a user of a smart wallet might name their partner, a sibling, a close friend, an old hardware wallet of their own, and a professional service as guardians. When their phone is destroyed, they install the wallet on a new device and ask guardians to approve the recovery; after the required approvals, and often a time delay that lets the real owner cancel a fraudulent attempt, the new device controls the wallet.

A common misconception is that guardians can access your funds; well-designed schemes only let them approve a key change, not sign transactions. The practical risks are collusion among guardians and choosing people who become unreachable, so guardian selection matters as much as the mechanism.