Why social recovery wallets matter.

The future of money should not depend on a password written on paper.

Wallet security has always been a primary concern in the crypto community. Although no other financial system in existence grants you the same level of freedom and control over your money that crypto does, at the same time, it can also be its greatest weakness. If you lose your wallet or the password to your wallet, there is (usually) no one who can help you recover it. If someone else gains access to your wallet (and your password) and steals everything, there is no way to reverse the transaction.

This problem of losing access to your money forever because you forgot the password and lost the seed phrase is one of the biggest UX and security challenges in crypto and accessing DeFi-products.

Since January, I have been exploring social wallet recovery and its applicability in simplifying crypto-inheritance and estate planning in DeFi. According to Vitalik co-founder Ethereum, “One of the great challenges with making cryptocurrency and blockchain applications usable for average users is security: how do we prevent users’ funds from being lost or stolen? Losses and thefts are a serious issue, often costing innocent blockchain users thousands of dollars or even in some cases the majority of their entire net worth”.

While there have been many improvements to these issues over the years, with the introduction of MultiSig infrastructures. A MultiSig wallet operates with multiple signature addresses. This means that it requires more than one private key to sign and authorize a crypto transaction, or, in some cases, that several keys can be used to generate a signature. According to Vitalik, “these solutions have all suffered from various defects — sometimes providing far less extra protection against theft and loss than is actually needed; sometimes being cumbersome and difficult to use leading to very low adoption, and sometimes both.”

Now, Social Recovery: the holy grail of wallets.

Now, many social media platforms like WeChat and Facebook ask you for your friend you chatted with the most and to identify your few friends, so they can recover your account in a situation where you lose access to your account.

Well, in crypto the games are extremely different from that, particularly, in terms of appropriate security measures during an account recovery to security. Because fundamentally, in crypto, your private key holds the underlying asset.

How we are making this simpler.

At ComiBlock.com, we are thinking through a simplified inheritance protocol for everyday people in crypto, because for us; providing an easy means to invest in crypto comes with many responsibilities. First, we have to ensure that your assets are safe, and Second, even if life happens, your loved ones can easily claim your crypto assets as part of your testament.

First, we are leveraging MPC technology (Multi-party computation is a subfield of cryptography that enables multiple parties to jointly compute a function without revealing the inputs.) to make wallets Keyless by replacing the traditional private key with three independently created mathematical secret shares. One share is stored on your mobile device with iCloud/Google Drive (It's encrypted), and the other is sent to ComiBlock (the company’s infrastructure, not the app); meanwhile, the last one is stored with a licensed key custodian.

This split gives you added protection. If anyone gets access to your iCloud or Google Drive, they can’t decrypt your share because we hold the encryption key to your share. And if a malicious actor gets access to our infrastructure, they won’t be able to access your wallet still, because they won’t do anything with our shares; neither will they do anything with shares the licensed key custodian holds.

Then the applicability to inheritance and wallet recovery

Already, our infrastructure sets up a network of “guardians” that will allow you to recover the wallet by default. What this means is — if you lose access to your mobile device, you can verify and recover your wallet. That’s kinda a cool game changer and brings another level of UX to crypto.

If you delete the app or want to move to a new device, it will be simpler to now recover your wallet using a 3D biometric face map you will create during account setup, and we use the latest security infrastructure on Android and iOS to secure your accounts also. On inheritance, users can add their next of kin data to their recovery kit.

If you want to go fully noncustodial.

We will be able to transfer our shares to your chosen guardians, be it friends or family, or HSM like Trezor. This means we still can provide the added security features you’d expect from a great bank without being a custodian.

We are currently in build mode, and you can book a time with me, let's talk more if you want to contribute to building the world’s most human crypto management infrastructure.

Join our waitlist @Comiblock.com