Greetings
Given that NEAR wants to bring blockchain to the masses, IMHO it is very important that NEAR implement “social recovery” of wallets. Social recovery is a way to recover wallets when the passphrase has been lost that relies on people (or machines) in one’s network. I recommend that NEAR become a social recovery wallet.
Vitalik Buterin wrote a post about it in early 2021.
This gets us to my preferred method for securing a wallet: social recovery. A social recovery system works as follows:
- There is a single “signing key” that can be used to approve transactions
- There is a set of at least 3 (or a much higher number) of “guardians”, of which a majority can cooperate to change the signing key of the account.
The signing key has the ability to add or remove guardians, though only after a delay (often 1-3 days).
Under all normal circumstances, the user can simply use their social recovery wallet like a regular wallet, signing messages with their signing key so that each transaction signed can fly off with a single confirmation click much like it would in a “traditional” wallet like Metamask.
If a user loses their signing key, that is when the social recovery functionality would kick in. The user can simply reach out to their guardians and ask them to sign a special transaction to change the signing pubkey registered in the wallet contract to a new one. This is easy: they can simply go to a webpage such as security.loopring.io, sign in, see a recovery request and sign it. About as easy for each guardian as making a Uniswap trade.
The full article is here: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
It would be exceptional if NEAR was the first layer 1 to have a social recovery wallet. It would mean that very few people would ever be locked out of the NEAR wallet, reducing frustration while strengthening community.