Introducing Lava Smart Key, our latest innovation which unlocks secure self-custody, ensuring your funds are safe from attackers while always being accessible to you.
Although bitcoin unlocked the potential for self-sovereign finance, taking self-custody of bitcoin has been so difficult that even bitcoin’s earliest developers have failed to do it securely. At current prices, ~$400 billion dollars of bitcoin has been lost by self-custody users, and the main culprit here is seedphrases: a 12-word backup for your vault that if lost or compromised means total loss of funds.
So, we set out to redesign self-custody security from first principles, and our answer is Lava Smart Key. There are 2 aspects of self-custody security with Lava Smart Key: making sure your funds are safe from external attackers (safety) and making sure your funds are always accessible to you (recovery).
Lava Smart Key aims to eliminate the possibility of a single mistake leading to loss of funds. Instead of forcing you into a 1-part backup (ex. seedphrase) that can be easily compromised, Lava Smart Key enables you to create a 2-of-2 backup for vault, where:
Compromising either half of your backup is difficult, and even if a half is compromised, fund loss doesn’t occur.
Lava Smart Key enables you to set custom recovery policies, ensuring that you can access your vault if you lose your device, device PIN, cloud password, cloud 2FA, Lava recovery PIN, or even if you lose all of the above at the same time. Our solution is flexible, allowing you to adapt your recovery policies as things change for you.
The following graphic illustrates how Lava Smart Key breaks your vault backup into 2 parts, your cloud account and Lava recovery PIN, and how you can set custom ways to recover each part if you’re worried about losing access to it: