Expanding on Vitalik Buterin’s vision for Social Recovery Security

Something has been bothering Vitalik Buterin for a while, he’s tweeted and talked about it several times in the last couple of years and finally at the start of the new decade of crypto he has blogged about it: How can ordinary crypto investors protect themselves from loss or theft? The answer is Social Recovery.

Of course there are passionate proponents of various solutions from paper in safety deposit boxes, to hardware wallets to multi-sig wallets — but at the end of the day, none of these solutions protect people from loss or theft in a way that makes sense: security without usability is useless, and the vast set of security solutions are way too complicated and awkward to use and result in low adoption and bad outcomes for some.

One analysis of the Bitcoin ecosystem suggests that 1500 BTC may be lost every day- over ten times more than what Bitcoin users spend on transaction fees, and over the years adding up to as much as 20% of the total supply.

Enter Social Recovery, a simple way to lower the risk of attack by distributing the unlocking mechanism amongst a group of Guardians and requiring a subset to approve unlock transactions.

Guardians can be made up of a diverse set of people from friends and family to business associates and institutions, perhaps in multiple geographies. Most importantly Guardians need not know what they are guarding nor the identities of the other Guardians.

… The reality is that the whole point of digital technology, blockchains included, is to make it easier for humans to engage in very complicated tasks without having to exert extreme mental effort or live in constant fear of making mistakes.

There are some very fine social recovery wallets discussed in Vitalik’s blog post, including Argent and Loopring and they do a great job of illustrating the utility of social recovery in action — for Ethereum. However social recovery is for everyone and not restricted to protecting ETH alone. Vault12 has developed the very first social recovery solutions since 2014, with a unique focus on ease of use and simplicity — a unicorn in the security space.

By expanding the utility of social recovery to any piece of data, on any blockchain (or not), any type of digital asset — be that cryptocurrency, blockchain keys, or highly valuable personal data, the Vault12 app protects ordinary consumers from loss and theft of their most valuable assets.

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Vault12 users need not to be shackled into limited, ETH only solutions — using Vault12 they can secure their whole digital life, protecting their assets — in this life and beyond, with Digital Inheritance.

Vault12 solved social recovery backup with Guardians of cryptocurrency keys years ago, and now we are on a mission to secure everyone’s digital life from encroaching censorship and authoritarian trends

What started as security for early adopters of BTC in 2014, should now be the security default for all our data — decentralized, distributed and stored only by trusted Guardians, not authoritarian tech giants.

PS: Our company enables you to create decentralized Vaults for ultra-secure distributed storage of your digital assets compatible with any blockchain, any wallet, and any asset. Sign up to receive updates here if you want to learn more!