Social recovery answers the objection that self-custody has no safety net. It gives you a second, independent route back into the wallet without giving anybody custody of it, which a backup copy of your phrase in someone else's hands would.
Choose guardians who are unlikely to fail together. Five people in the same household is a lower threshold than it looks.
Configure guardians
- 1
Open Settings → Recovery → Social recovery.
- 2
Add your guardians.
Pick people you can reach independently and who would not all be affected by the same event.
- 3
Set the threshold.
A higher threshold is harder for an attacker to reach and harder for you to reach. Three of five is a common balance.
- 4
Confirm and let each guardian accept their share.
- 5
Note that the passphrase is deliberately handled out-of-band.
If you use one, guardians recovering the shares still cannot open the wallet without it. That is the design, not an oversight.
- 6
Review your guardian list occasionally.
Relationships and phone numbers change; a guardian you cannot reach is not a guardian.
Good to know
- Recovery can be initiated by you or by guardians, and an owner-initiated cancellation stops a recovery in progress — which is the defence against guardians colluding against you.
- Guardians hold shares, not your phrase. A single guardian's share reveals nothing.
- Social recovery is a complement to a written phrase backup, not a replacement for it.
Frequently asked
Not individually — a share on its own is useless. A threshold number of them colluding could start a recovery, which is why you are notified and can cancel it, and why a passphrase you never shared remains a separate barrier.
No. The backend stores ciphertext only, and holds no key that would decrypt it.
That is what the threshold is for: M of N means you can lose up to N minus M guardians and still recover. Replace a lost guardian when it happens rather than waiting until you need them.
Get SpendTheBits
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