The HBAR Foundation, Algorand Foundation, Hashgraph Association, Swirlds Labs, DLT Science Foundation, and industry partners The Building Blocks and BankSocial, have joined forces to establish the Decentralized Recovery Alliance (DeRec). This alliance, unveiled at the CFC St. Moritz conference in Switzerland, aims to develop an interoperability recovery standard that will revolutionize the recovery and adoption of digital assets across the rapidly evolving Web3 landscape.
Web3 applications are gaining mainstream traction, prompting the need for a seamless and user-friendly experience to facilitate widespread adoption. The current landscape demands a high level of sophistication from users, who must navigate the complex task of securing their digital assets, accounts, keys, and passwords.
Dr. Leemon Baird, co-founder of Hedera and co-CEO of Swirlds Labs, and John Woods, CTO of Algorand Foundation, introduced the DeRec Alliance as a collaborative effort to create an open-source, industry-standard methodology for painless and secure digital asset recovery across wallets.
“The DeRec Alliance is a group of individuals and organizations committed to making the process of securing and recovering digital assets, accounts, passwords, and other secrets as simple as existing Web2 experiences,” stated Dr. Baird. “We encourage every blockchain and every industry to work together to create the standards and the open source code needed to bring safety to the promise of Web3, without the complexity.”
John Woods emphasized the importance of a seamless user experience, stating, “Seamless user experience is core to any great product. In order for projects like Hedera and Algorand to bring their benefits to a global audience, we need to maximize ease of use and minimize risk associated with self-sovereignty. DeRec is an ambitious effort to solve one of the biggest Web3 UX issues, key ownership. And best of all, it’s been done in a way that is project agnostic, meaning it’s completely interoperable across the industry. Algorand is excited to be a part of this story.”
The DeRec Protocol
The Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) open-source protocol is a standard approach to secret management based on secret sharing among a set of helpers, such as friends or businesses. These helpers can assist the user in recovering their secret when needed. Each helper’s share reveals no information about the original secret, and half the helpers can provide the user with their shares to reconstruct the secret, even when the user has lost their phone or other two-factor recovery device. The protocol includes automatic regular confirmations that helpers still have shares of secrets and automatic re-sharing when secrets change or helpers join or leave. Importantly, the user never reveals who the helpers are, nor even how many helpers there are, and even the helpers won’t know that.
About The DeRec Alliance
The DeRec Alliance is a collaboration of forward-thinking companies from across the Web2 and Web3 ecosystems committed to simplifying the process of securing and recovering digital assets, accounts, and other secrets. Leveraging a new open-source standard, these organizations are working together to help their users and the broader world realize the promise of Web3 without the complexity.
Image by Mark Tan from Unsplash
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