Blockchain platforms Hedera and Algorand announced a partnership today to create a decentralized wallet recovery system.
Revealed at the Crypto Finance Conference in St. Moritz, the collaboration involves the formation of the DeRec Alliance, which includes key organizations from both ecosystems.
The initiative seeks to establish a standardized protocol for secret management, addressing the challenges users face in securing and recovering their digital assets. The risk of losing access to digital assets due to lost or forgotten keys is one of the most pressing issues in the decentralized finance space.
The DeRec Alliance, which includes the HBAR Foundation and Algorand Foundation among others, aims to simplify the recovery process by implementing the Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) protocol, an open-source protocol based on the concept of secret sharing, where a user’s ‘secrets’ — such as private keys or passwords — are divided among a trusted group of helpers. These helpers could be friends or institutions that hold a share of the secret, enabling recovery without any single party having access to the complete information.
The protocol ensures that even if a user loses their recovery device, they can still regain access to their assets with the assistance of a sufficient number of helpers.
The DeRec protocol also features automatic confirmations to ensure helpers retain their shares of the secret and automatic resharing when there are changes to the secret or the group of helpers.
The identities of the helpers remain confidential, and they are unaware of each other, maintaining privacy and security within the recovery process.
