Everything you need to know about Seedless Recovery: Their advantages, how to implement them for Wallets and how does it work?

Obvious is thrilled to announce a new way to back up your seed phrase that is more secure and is the future of seed phrase management. Recently, we announced a partnership with Silence Laboratories, to leverage secure multi-party computation that enables MPC-based seed-phrase management wallet backup of your Obvious wallet.

Today, in this blog, we’ll explain in detail, about seedless recovery and how to use it with Obvious Smart wallet.

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What is Seedless Recovery?

Seedless Recovery based on MPC or Multi-Party computation is a simple cryptographic scheme that involves multiple participants. 

If a single set of seed phrase is split into parts and distributed amongst participants, each participant only knows the part in their possession and must do some collective work using their part. For example:- assume you have a puzzle that unlocks a treasure. To enhance the security of puzzle, you decide to split the puzzle in 3 parts and give to 3 of your friends. Each friend of yours only knows about the part in their possession. To complete the puzzle, you need all the 3 parts. Each friend holding the part, doesn't know about the other friend and cannot do anything with the part in their posession.

Obvious and Silence labs have come up with a way of doing this called Seedless Recovery. Obvious splits the user’s seed phrase into three parts which are encrypted and can be stored in 3 different places. To restore your wallet, all you need is 2 out of the 3 parts.

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Why do you need it?

Splitting up the seed into 3 parts is better than storing the complete seed phrase in case of a vulnerability or in the case that your seed phrase is exposed. Each part in Seedless recovery is encrypted and stored in 3 different locations. This means that, even if an attacker is able to get access to one part, they won't be able to exploit the wallet as they don't have the descryption key as well as access to other 2 parts.

Splitting up the seed phrase also helps in case you lose your seed phrase since you can still access 2 of the other 3 parts.This gives higher security for your wallet and funds than traditional ways of either uploading on the cloud or storing the complete seed phrase manually. 

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How does Seedless recovery Work on Obvious Smart Wallet?

Obvious gives you the option to back up your seed phrase using Seedless Recovery. Here are the three steps of Seedless Recovery.

1. Device Key: A part of your seed phrase is stored locally on your device. 
2. Social Key: Share a part of your seed phrase with a trusted third party as a QR code image.
3. Cloud Key: Upload a part of your seed phrase on Google cloud so that it can be retrieved again later. 

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How do I use Seedless recovery on Obvious Smart wallet?

You can download the Obvious Smart wallet through the Android play store or iOS app store. If you are new to Smart wallets and how they function, you can read our detailed blog here.

When you download the Obvious app and create a new wallet, you have the option to back up your wallet using the Seedless recovery method as soon as the wallet is created. Please remember to always backup your crypto wallet.

If you are an existing user of the Obvious app, you can back up your wallet using Seedless recovery by :

1. Log in Obvious Smart wallet.
2. Tap on the "More" tab.
3. Tap on the wallet you want to backup from the backup ending group.
4. Click on Backup pending option.
5. Click on Setup Seedless recovery option.
6. Follow the steps as mentioned.

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Obvious has always been committed to providing the highest level of security to their users and Silence Laboratories has helped in taking our efforts to the next level. Seedless recovery coupled with Account abstraction, makes Obvious smart wallet one of the best wallets out there when it comes to user experience and security for your assets.