How to set up social recovery with guardians

Quick answer: Open Vaultr’s recovery settings, nominate trusted people as guardians, and confirm a recovery threshold (the default is 2 of 3 guardians must approve). If you ever lose access, your guardians receive a push notification and approve your request. There is no seed phrase involved, and the entire process is written to an immutable audit trail.

What is social recovery in Vaultr?

Social recovery lets you regain access to your account using people you trust instead of a fragile seed phrase. You nominate guardians, and a quorum of them must approve before access is restored. Because Vaultr is non-custodial, this design keeps recovery in the hands of people you choose rather than any central company holding your keys.

The key building blocks are:

• Guardians — trusted people you nominate to help you recover.
• Threshold — how many guardians must approve. The default is 2 of 3.
• Push notifications — how guardians are alerted to a request.
• Audit trail — an immutable log recording every step.

How do I set up guardians?

Follow these steps to enable social recovery:

1. Open Recovery settings in your Vaultr profile.
2. Choose Social recovery and start the guardian setup flow.
3. Nominate your guardians — pick trusted people such as close family or long-time friends.
4. Confirm the threshold. The default is 2 of 3, meaning any two of your three guardians can together approve a recovery.
5. Let your guardians know they have been nominated so they recognise the request when it arrives.

Because there is no seed phrase, you do not need to write anything down or store a secret offline. Your safety net is the people you trust plus the cryptographic process Vaultr runs for you.