Social recovery is a wallet security mechanism that lets a user regain control of an account by relying on a set of trusted guardians rather than a single seed phrase. If a signing key is lost, a quorum of designated guardians can authorise a key rotation to a new owner address without ever holding the funds themselves. It mitigates catastrophic key loss while preserving self-custody, and is a flagship use case for smart-contract wallets.
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- Guardians never hold funds; they collectively authorise a key rotation to a new owner address through the wallet contract. The pattern is enabled by Account Abstraction, which makes wallets programmable, and shares cryptographic foundations with Multi-Sig Governance where thresholds of independent signers govern privileged actions.