Recovery

With traditional authentication, losing access usually means losing your account. Password resets depend on email providers. Seed phrases, once lost, are gone forever. 1auth takes a different approach.

Every 1auth account is a smart contract on the blockchain. The account's rules — who can sign, who can authorize recovery — are stored on-chain, not in any single company's database. This means recovery can work through multiple independent paths, and no single point of failure can permanently lock a user out.

Two Recovery Scenarios

Recovery in 1auth is designed around two fundamentally different situations:

The user loses their passkey

A phone breaks, a laptop is stolen, or a passkey simply stops working. The user is fine — they just need a way to prove who they are and register a new passkey on a new device. This is handled by guardians: trusted signers that the user sets up in advance (like a linked Google account) that can vouch for their identity and authorize adding a new passkey.

Learn how lost passkey recovery works

The service goes offline

The 1auth service itself becomes unavailable — temporarily or permanently. In this case, the user still has their passkey, but the infrastructure they normally interact with is gone. Because the account and its recovery configuration live entirely on-chain, independent signers that operate outside of 1auth can step in. The user proves their identity directly to these signers, who authorize recovery by reading verification data straight from the blockchain.

Learn how trustless recovery works

The Underlying Principle

Both scenarios share the same design principle: the user's account is defined by on-chain state, not by any service's availability. Guardians, identity commitments, and signer configurations are all stored in the smart contract. Any authorized party — whether it's the 1auth backend, an independent signer, or a decentralized network — can read that state and help the user recover, as long as the user can prove they are who they say they are.