Trusted Contacts are people you know and trust that can help you recover should you ever lose part of your wallet. Instead of relying on a company to verify you through government issued IDs, privacy compromising photos / videos of your face, or complicated security questions, Bitkey allows you to select people you know and trust to do this verification. Trusted Contacts will help verify that you are you should you ever need to restore or replace part of your wallet. This makes recovery simple, easy, AND secure. Trusted Contacts don’t ever gain access or control over any of the keys to your wallet, and can only assist with recoveries you initiate.
You can invite a friend or family member to be your Trusted Contact by sending them a message created within the Bitkey app, which includes an invite link and a code. To become a Trusted Contact, simply accept the invitation by clicking on the link and installing the Bitkey app (if you haven’t already). Once the invitation has been accepted, your Trusted Contact will be able to help you recover from losing a part or parts of your wallet. Once you have initiated the recovery process, the Bitkey app will instruct you to reach out to your Trusted Contact and share a recovery code with them. The Trusted Contact, using their own Bitkey app, will enter that recovery code serving as a form of verification, so that the recovery process can continue. You can add one, two or three Trusted Contacts, but only one is needed for verification. Bitkey also gives you the ability to remove a Trusted Contact should circumstances change, and will notify you if one of your Trusted Contacts takes action to remove themselves.
Adding at least one Trusted Contact provides you with a way to recover from losing not just your phone, or your Bitkey hardware device, but losing both of them at the same time. If you lose your phone and don’t have your Bitkey hardware available to approve a restoration from your cloud backup, you can use a Trusted Contact to verify you as you initiate recovery. Once verified, your cloud backup will be unlocked which will allow you to restore your Mobile Key on your new phone. Using a Trusted Contact quickly gets you back in control of one of your keys, which you can then use to recover from the loss of the second key through Delay + Notify, the hardware replacement recovery process.