Work in progress on an automated solution for lost EOS genesis keys
Work in progress on an automated solution for lost EOS genesis keys
Along with some friends from the EOS community, we’ve begun work on an automated key recovery solution for folks who’ve lost access to their EOS genesis accounts.
Prior to launching the EOS Mainnet in June, many of us already held EOS in the form of placeholder tokens on the Ethereum network. We needed to go through a process of generating a true EOS key pair and registering it with the Ethereum wallet that held our EOS placeholder tokens. When the EOS chain launched, our placeholder tokens were locked, never to be used again, and we gained access to our true EOS tokens with that EOS key pair we generated prior to launch. Unfortunately, a significant number of our friends in the EOS community have lost that EOS key pair. These people can’t access their EOS tokens, but they can still prove they are the rightful owners with their Ethereum keys.
On Sunday, December 23, representatives from eosDAC, LibertyBock, EOS Authority, and EOS Nation met to discuss a solution. And we learned that we’re well on our way thanks to work already completed by EOS Authority and EOS Argentina on the solution for unregistered accounts, and by EOSRIO, EOS42, eosDAC, EOSSW/eden, HKEOS, Block Matrix and EOS Tribe on EOS 911.
The scope
This could change over time, but for now we’re focused on building an automated EOS key recovery system for token holders that fall “in scope,” as defined below. We’ll avoid recovering keys for accounts as defined under “out of scope.”
In scope:
- Token holders who have registered an EOS account pre-genesis, have access to their ETH private key, but don’t have access to working EOS private keys for that account.
- Token holders who are eligible to use the fallback process, but prefer not to.
Out of scope:
- Token holders who have lost EOS keys for an account they created after the EOS Mainnet launched.
- Token holders who do not have access to their ETH private key linked to the lost EOS account.
- Token holders whose lost EOS key has authorized transactions on the mainnet genesis account.
Work in progress
- Tool that enables token holders to prove ownership of their EOS account by signing a message with the ETH private key that’s been registered to it.
- Smart Contract to verify the ETH signature, including a mechanism to start the process of approving a key change.
- Script that verifies there’s been no transactions authorized on the EOS account, and possibly other checks on the original ETH account.
- Portal for token holders to block recovery of EOS keys registered to a compromised Ethereum wallet.
- Design and build a system to approve the key recovery through top 21 multisig.
You can observe our progress here on Medium, where EOS Nation will be posting status updates after each meeting.
