Glossary
Social Recovery
A wallet scheme where a set of trusted guardians can jointly restore access to your account if you lose your key — no seed phrase to safeguard.
Social recovery replaces the single seed phrase with a group of guardians — other wallets, hardware devices, friends, or institutions — that you nominate when you set up a smart contract account. Day-to-day you sign with one key, so nothing changes. But if that key is lost or compromised, a threshold of your guardians (say 3 of 5) can approve a transaction that rotates the account to a new signing key.
Because the guardians only act together and never hold your funds, no single one can steal from you, and losing your phone no longer means losing everything. Argent popularized the pattern, and account abstraction (ERC-4337) makes it available to any smart wallet. Sensible designs add a time delay to recovery so you can veto a malicious attempt.