DeRec Alliance Core Tenets

Updated February 14, 2024  

Overview

The DeRec Alliance (“Alliance”) is a group of individuals and organizations from across the Web2 and Web3 ecosystems that is committed to making the process of securing and recovering digital assets, accounts, passwords, and other secrets as simple as existing Web2 experiences. The DeRec Alliance promotes the ability for every blockchain and industry to work together to create the standards and open source code needed to bring safety to the promise of Web3, without the complexity.

Tagline

Simplifying and Standardizing Secrets Recovery for the Web2 and Web3 Economy

Vision

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. Today 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. The DeRec Alliance is committed to maintaining a best-in-class solution to address these pain points.

Mission

The DeRec Alliance brings together the Web3 ecosystem to offer an open-source, industry-standard methodology that makes recovery of secrets such as keys for digital assets recovery simple and secure across wallets using the Decentralized Recovery (“DeRec”) protocol.

Protocol

The Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) protocol is a novel protocol for managing secrets like private keys 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. 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. For the purposes of this charter, the word “protocol” refers to both DeRec protocol code and documentation.

Goals

  1. Foster, maintain, and grow global open-source, industry-agnostic standards for secure and simple digital asset recovery (i.e., the Decentralized Recovery or “DeRec” protocol).
  2. Promote the adoption of the DeRec protocol in the Web3 ecosystems, across different chains/ledgers. The more products, people, and institutions that use DeRec for secret security and recovery services, the stronger the solution is.
  3. Attract strong Alliance members and community participants to contribute to and advocate for the project.

Guiding Principles

  • Interoperability is critical to the success of the DeRec solution. DeRec is for all industries, all blockchains, all applications that need to prevent loss of secrets. The Alliance must work to ensure that a helper can help any sharer, even if using different applications or products from different creators.
  • Trust and transparency in the DeRec protocol is paramount. The Alliance must take appropriate steps to ensure that the DeRec protocol is secure for users to protect its reputation and integrity.
  • Solutions should be elegant, leveraging best-in-class cryptography.
  • The Alliance is open and accessible, and operates independently of specific partisan interests. The Alliance accepts all contributors based on the merit of their contributions, and the Alliance’s technology must be available to all according to open source values. The technical community and its decisions shall be transparent.