Hedera and Algorand Ecosystems Join Forces to Form DeRec Alliance, Enabling Mass Market Decentralized Recovery

Decentralized Recovery Makes Cold Storage, Self-Custody and other Earlier Forms of Account Recovery Unnecessary for Any Kind of Asset

Entities from across the Hedera and Algorand ecosystems, including the HBAR Foundation, Algorand Foundation, the Hashgraph Association, Swirlds Labs, the DLT Science Foundation, and industry partners The Building Blocks and BankSocial, are partnering to develop a new interoperability recovery standard which will dramatically simplify the recovery and adoption of crypto and other assets.

As Web3 applications become mainstream, application providers want to make the user experience seamless, user-friendly, and simple enough to gain widespread adoption by millions worldwide. the experience requires a highly sophisticated user, willing to take on the onerous task of securing their online secrets, such as digital assets, accounts, keys, and passwords.

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The DeRec Alliance aims to bring together the Web3 ecosystem to offer an open-source, industry-standard methodology that makes digital asset recovery painless and secure across wallets. It was announced this morning at the industry leading conference CFC St. Moritz in Switzerland, where Dr. Leemon Baird, co-founder of Hedera and co-CEO of Swirlds Labs, and John Woods, CTO of Algorand Foundation, spoke jointly on a morning panel on Layer 1 superpowers.

“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,” said 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.”

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“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,” said Woods. “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.”

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The Protocol

The Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) open source protocol is a standard approach to secret management, based on secret sharing among a set of helpers (e.g. friends or businesses), who can assist the user to recover their secret when needed. Each helper’s share reveals no information about the original secret, and half the helpers can give the user their shares to reconstruct the secret, even when a 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. The user never reveals who the helpers are, nor even how many helpers there are, and even the helpers won’t know that.

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