There is no limitation to the types of digital information that can be backed up and recovered using the open Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) Protocol. There is also no limitation on the number of secrets that can be protected during a single engagement with the DeRec Protocol. It’s just as easy to protect 1000 secrets as it is to protect one. For this reason, the DeRec Protocol is suitable for inclusion in desktop, mobile, and web apps of all types. However, there are some categories of applications and sensitive information that involve more risk than others.
For example, many blockchain industry estimates suggest that as much as 20 percent of the circulating supply of Bitcoin valued at hundreds of billions of dollars is unavailable to its owners because the associated accounts are inaccessible due to lost, misplaced, or forgotten Bitcoin credentials. Mainstream media headlines are filled with horror stories like the one where one man wants to buy an entire landfill just to recover his lost Bitcoin.
As opposed to centralized services where service operators typically provide a safety net (ie: a password recovery scheme) for recovering lost account access, no such safety net exists for Bitcoin or any other public distributed ledger (Ethereum, Algorand, Cardano, Hedera, Ripple, etc.). If cryptocurrency wallet developers incorporated support for the DeRec Protocol into their wares, not only could the users of those wallets be protected from catastrophic losses, it would greatly reduce the fear factor when it comes to new user adoption of blockchain and cryptocurrency.
However, the DeRec Protocol is not limited to the protection of blockchain credentials such as the private keys to specific distributed ledger accounts and the mnemonic/seed recovery phrases for wallets. In fact, technically, the DeRec Protocol has nothing to do with blockchain. The operator of any website could also offer its users the ability to backup their account credentials to a network of handpicked DeRec Helpers (see our FAQ: What is a DeRec Helper?).
Password managers could offer their users the option of backing up their user IDs, passwords, passkeys and two-factor recovery phrases using the DeRec Protocol. File managers that are built-into the various desktop and mobile operating systems could offer a DeRec-compliant option for backing up important documents and images. The DeRec Protocol is also ideal for the backup and recovery of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). The number of applications that could support the DeRec Protocol is virtually limitless and so too are the types of secrets that can be protected with it. The DeRec Protocol is open, royalty free and unencumbered. All of the DeRec Alliance’s libraries and tools are available under the Apache Open Source License.