The DeRec Alliance now has Ripple and XRPL Labs as founding members, as they develop a protocol for easy asset recovery.
Ripple and XRP Labs are now members of the Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) Alliance, an association formed to create an open-source and industry-standard methodology to simplify digital asset recovery. Along with Hedera blockchain network developer Swirld Labs, and the Algorand Foundation, Ripple and XRPL Labs are the founding members of the DeRec Alliance.
DeRec Alliance Simplifies for Crypto Asset Recovery
An official press release notes that today’s Web3 applications require a “highly sophisticated user” that understands and can handle the task of securing sensitive information, including digital assets, keys, accounts, and passwords. With decentralized recovery, self-custody, cold storage, and other forms of account recovery are unnecessary.
The Alliance was founded by Dr. Leemon Baird, also the co-founder of Hedera. Baird stated:
“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. 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.”
Members of the DeRec Alliance also include The Hashgraph Association, Casper Association, Acoer, and Constellation Network. Others are The HBAR Foundation, Revive Labs, The Building Blocks, Blade Labs, and BankSocial. All Alliance members are tasked with providing input and feedback on policies that will help create an interoperable recovery standard. The plan is to ease the recovery and adoption of crypto and other assets.
According to Markus Infanger, Senior Vice President of RippleX, the developer and community platform created by Ripple, The DeRec Alliance solves one of the biggest problems facing crypto adoption. Infanger said by developing clear standards for key recovery, the Alliance gives users more control and boosts their confidence. XRPL Labs founder and CEO Wietse Wind echoed Infanger’s sentiments, adding that user-friendly solutions for key recovery are essential to mass retail adoption.
The DeRec Alliance features a Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) with two-year seats filled by founding members. The TOC’s function is to offer input on the Alliance’s governance structure and core policies.
DeRec Protocol Shares Secrets among “Helpers”
The Alliance’s method is the Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) open-source protocol that takes a secret-sharing approach to recovery data management. The protocol helps a user share secrets among a list of helpers (businesses or friends)that can help the user recover their secret whenever necessary. Each helper’s share does not indicate any information about the original secret, which can only be properly compiled by the original user. Also, the user can reconstruct their original secret even if only half the helpers reveal their shares. This works even if the user has lost their primary two-factor recovery device, such as their phone.
To maintain availability, the DeRec protocol periodically uses regular confirmations to ensure that helpers still hold their shares of the secret. In addition, the protocol initiates automatic re-sharing whenever the secret changes, or a helper leaves or joins. Throughout the process, the user never has to reveal any helper’s identity or the number of helpers they have. In the same way, helpers also do not have information about other helpers.
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