Vitalik: Why we need widespread adoption of social recovery wallets

Original title: "V God: Why we need to widely adopt social recovery wallet"

Original source: Hu Tao

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On January 11, Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, published an article on his blog saying that because the anti-theft and anti-loss protection functions of current cryptocurrency wallets are far less than actual needs, sometimes they are clumsy and difficult. use, leading to extremely low usage. Therefore, V God pointed out that a better alternative has emerged in the industry recently: a new type of smart contract wallet called social recovery wallet (social recovery wallets).

V God said that today’s hardware wallets still have the risk of supply chain attacks and single points of failure, although mnemonic phrases are helpful It is good at preventing loss, but it has no effect on anti-theft, and the experience is not friendly enough. Therefore, users need a wallet design that meets three key criteria:

First, there is no single point of failure; Low psychological burden, as far as possible, users should not be required to learn unfamiliar new habits, or pay mental effort to always remember and follow certain behavior patterns; the third is the greatest degree of transaction convenience, most normal activities require less energy Should be much more than regular wallets (e.g. Metamask).

Therefore, this article leads to the social recovery wallet, and its working principle mainly has two parts. First, only one signing key can be used to approve transactions; second, there are at least 3 (or more) guardians, most of whom can cooperate to change the account's signing key key.

Users can add guardians by entering their ENS name or ETH address, who sign the transaction on the recovery webpage After agreeing to add, the user can successfully add a guardian for his account address.

In all normal circumstances, users can simply use their social recovery wallet like a normal wallet, and use their signature The secret key signs the message, allowing each signed transaction to be quickly completed with a single confirmation click.

If the user loses the signing key, social recovery kicks in. Users can contact guardians directly and ask them to sign a special transaction to change the signature public key registered in the wallet contract to a new signature.

The guardian can then simply go to a webpage such as security.loopring.io, log in, review the recovery request and It signs. For every Guardian, it's as easy as doing a Uniswap transaction.

Common guardian options can include three, one is other devices (or paper mnemonics) owned by the wallet holder themselves ); second, friends and family; and third, the agency will sign the recovery message upon receipt of the user's phone number or email confirmation, or in high-value cases, a video call to verify identity.

However, in order to reduce the risk of attacking guardians and collusion, V God recommends that users do not need to publicly know the identity of their guardians. Choose from a variety of guardians (preferably an institutional guardian) in your circle.

In the event of the death or permanent incapacity of a user, it will be a standard socially accepted protocol that guardians can publicly declare themselves , so that in this case, they can find each other and recover the user's funds.

Currently, the two main wallets that have implemented social recovery features are Argent Wallet and Loopring Wallet. Both of them currently have two big problems, reliance on relayers to resolve transactions, and high transaction fees, but this can be solved by moving the ecosystem to a layer 2 protocol, such as ZK rollups.

V God also stated that the plan may be seen as a betrayal of the value of the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry, but this The criticism stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of encryption.

“For me, the goal of cryptocurrencies has never been to eliminate the need for all trust.Instead, the purpose of encryption is to give people access to cryptographic and economic building blocks, thereby giving people more choices of who to trust, and allowing people to build more constrained forms of trust: empowering someone to represent you The power to do something does not give them the power to do anything."

"So it seems that multisig And the social recovery system is a perfect expression of this principle: each participant has some ability to influence the acceptance or rejection of transactions, but no one can unilaterally transfer funds. In contrast to the situation where funds must be controlled unilaterally by one person or key This more complex logic can make the setup much more secure than that,” said V God.

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