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Vitalik's latest views: How to select Guardians for Multi-sign Wallet and Social Recovery Wallet?

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The two key issues with using a multi-signature wallet and a social recovery wallet safely are: Who do you choose as a guardian, and what instructions do you give them?

Original title: How I think about choosing guardians for sig and social recovery wallets

Original article by Vitalik Buterin

Qian Wen, ChainCatcher

A multi-signature wallet (such as Gnosis Safe) is a simple and secure way to store your money, allowing you to enjoy most of the benefits of self-escrow -- and not lose your money when a centralised entity that seems trustworthy turns out to be untrustworthy. But at the same time you don't run the risk of being responsible for the entire security setup. I personally use a multi-sign wallet to store most of my money, as does the Ethereum Foundation.

Another similar multi-signature wallet is the social Recovery wallet -- a single key can be used to sign a transaction, but if that key is lost, a set of keys held by someone else can be used to recover funds. The Social Recovery Wallet is easier to use than the multi-sign wallet, especially the rise of the ERC-4337 account Abstract, Soul Wallet ( The Soul Wallet is on the horizon, making the technology even more user-friendly. Once the social recovery wallet is mature enough, my suggestion is to put a social recovery wallet, which stores a small portion of an individual's or organization's funds; Use multiple signatures for cold wallets to store personal or organizational savings.

Both the multi-signature wallet and the social recovery wallet rely on the concept of a "guardian" : a set of N addresses, usually held by someone else, where any M addresses can approve an operation (for example, N=6 and M=4 can be set). In the case of a multi-signature wallet, each transaction must be signed by M of N guardians. In the case of a social recovery wallet, a single key can sign the transaction, but if that key is lost, M individuals in N guardians must sign the message to reset the key.

The two key issues with using a multi-signature wallet and a social recovery wallet safely are: (i) who do you choose as a guardian, and (ii) what instructions do you give them? This article will outline how I think about this issue, and much of it should apply equally to the multi-signature and social recovery wallets that are used to secure personal and organizational funds.

What do we want from the Guardian?

Minimize the probability of losing the key.

Minimize the chances that they will collude to steal your money or be coerced into doing so.

In situations where the two risks are unavoidable, the risks of each guardian should be as uncorrelated as possible -- you want to minimize their commonality as much as possible

Lead to the risk of disabling or affecting many of your guardians at once.

The answer to this question is simple, but it has guided all my choices regarding Guardians:

Guardians can be your own devices, but don't let too many devices become your guardians.

It's only natural that at least one guardian will be the wallet on your own device, after all, it's your own money, and there's no reason why this should interfere with decentralization. However, once you have more than one guardian under your control, you face a tricky conundrum: you have less trust in others and also concentrate more power in yourself, which can create risks if you are hacked, coerced, incapacitated or die.

It's been my experience that there should be enough guardians under the control of others. If you disappear, there are enough other guardians to get your money back. That is, you should control at least one Guardian and at most N-M Guardian. Also, each guardian should be on a separate device (laptop, cell phone, old cell phone, etc.).

Choose guardians you don't talk to often, or better yet, you don't know.

Ideally, the guardian doesn't know who the other person is. This greatly reduces the risk that they will conspire, and besides, there is no good reason for them to know each other. If something happens to you, they will still be able to find each other, because there are some obvious standard procedures that naturally come to mind in such a situation (for example, contacting your family).

In addition, you want to minimize the correlation between guardians: don't choose two guardians who live in the same city (or even better, the same country), or two guardians who use the same type of wallet, and balance between different operating systems.

The Guardian should ask a security question before approving an operation:

When you ask the Guardian to approve an action for you (in the case of multiple signings, a transaction; In the Social Recovery wallet, which means resetting the key to your account), they shouldn't start right away. This is a disaster for security: if someone hacks into your chat account, they can steal your funds by scanning your messages, finding out who your guardians are, contacting each of them and asking them to confirm.

To avoid this, my preferred procedure is to instruct the guardian to raise the security issue. When you ask for confirmation of your operation, the Guardian should ask you something that only the two of you and very few people know (e.g., "What food did we eat when we last met?" ), only confirm the action if you give the correct answer.

A natural choice would be voice or video calls, but in an age when AI has become adept at faking, this is less credible, so you might want to combine voice/video calls with asking some sort of security question.

If you're a "Degen veteran", make sure your guardians can react quickly. Otherwise, you don't have to ask.

If you are doing something risky with an on-chain contract, you may need to act fast: pull money out if there is a hole in the contract. If you are about to be liquidated, move the money out, etc. If you have these needs, then you want to find guardians who can move quickly on short notice (and therefore also find guardians in different time zones so that there are enough guardians to close the deal at all times) to protect your funds. However, if you don't do this sort of thing, then speed is not particularly important, and in fact may even be somewhat harmful, since persuading people to act urgently is a common social engineering tactic used by hackers, and if people dislike this spirit, it may actually be a good thing.

Test each Guardian at least once a year

Do test operations at least once a year. Ideally, do two test operations a year, one using half the guardians and one using the other half of the guardians. This ensures that your guardian doesn't forget or lose their account.

A further issue: privacy

One of the challenges of Guardian is that there is currently no technology to shield your financial privacy from Guardian. However, this is a technical problem that can be solved technically: Instead of guarding your account directly, the Guardian guards a "safe" contract, where the link between your account and the safe is hidden.

It is very easy to keep links hidden until recovery is needed: for example, your account can have a Guardian CREATE2 contract that only the safe can create. However, more advanced ZK-SNARK technology is needed if the link is to remain hidden after recovery. I expect this problem to be slowly resolved over the next few years.