User Wallet Data Format
Wallet data trapped inside one provider's software is a problem for the user who wants to leave and for anyone who has to answer a data request. This defines a single portable file holding everything about one user's wallet.
16 standards
Backup and recovery
What happens when the phone is gone. Standards here cover mnemonic phrases, splitting a key into shares so no single copy is enough, and services that hold one of those shares for you.
Also searched as mnemonic, seed phrase, Shamir, secret sharing, threshold, recovery, vault.
Filed under
16 standards, spread across 5 of the 12 topics.
Start with
BRC-140
Threshold Key Sharing and Backup via Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme
A single key is a single point of failure: lose it and everything is gone, and copying it multiplies the chance of theft. This splits it into pieces where a chosen number of them rebuild it and any fewer reveal nothing.
Filed under Key derivation
Standards about this
Backup and recovery is the main subject of these 9.
38 39 User Wallet Data Format Encryption Extension
A file containing everything about your wallet is not something to leave lying around unprotected. This defines the encrypted wrapper around such an export, so a backup can be stored safely and restored with a password.
75 Mnemonic For Master Private Key
A master key is a long string nobody can write down reliably, and losing it loses everything. This adapts the familiar twelve-to-twenty-four word phrase so a single key can be recorded as words and restored from them.
140 Threshold Key Sharing and Backup via Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme
A single key is a single point of failure: lose it and everything is gone, and copying it multiplies the chance of theft. This splits it into pieces where a chosen number of them rebuild it and any fewer reveal nothing.
154 Pluggable Backup Services for BRC-140 Share Vaults
If you want a backup copy of a wallet's secret key material held outside the wallet, there has never been a common way for different storage providers to speak the same language. Without it, a wallet app would have to hand-roll a custom recovery API for every provider, and users would end up trusting a single company with their entire recovery path. This makes it possible to spread recovery pieces across independent services that all understand the same request and response shapes.
157 Entropy-Rooted Backup and Recovery with Mnemonics and Backup Shares
Wallet users end up locked into one backup method forever. If your wallet was set up with a written-down word phrase, you cannot later split your backup into shares you hand to trusted people, and if it was set up with shares, you cannot get a word phrase out of it. Someone switching wallets or wanting both options at once has been stuck picking one at creation time.
188 User Management Protocol (UMP)
Losing a password usually means losing an account forever, but trusting one login service with everything makes that service a single point of failure it can abuse or lose. People need a way to open the same wallet account on a new device or recover it after losing a password, a phone, or a service provider, without any single party being able to lock them out or hold their funds hostage.
249 Vault Account Holding Across DevicesDraft (proposed number, not a BSVA assignment)
A wallet backup can be restored on more than one phone or laptop, but if two devices both treat the same account as theirs to spend from, they can each build a payment from coins the other has already spent, and the blockchain will only accept one of them. Before this, the only fix was asking a server before every payment, which is slow and breaks when offline. This makes it possible to keep a vault's accounts spread across several trusted devices safely, without that per-payment check.
250 Device Login and RecoveryDraft (proposed number, not a BSVA assignment)
Signing in to a self-custodial wallet on a new phone is normally stuck between two bad options: either some server holds enough of your secret to log you in (so it can also be hacked or coerced into logging someone else in), or you have to manually copy a long recovery phrase between devices every time. This makes it hard to offer a simple "sign in with your email" experience without quietly giving a company the power to open your wallet.
Standards that touch it
These are about something else, and deal with backup and recovery on the way.
32 BIP32 Key Derivation Scheme
Keeping a separate backup for every key is impractical, so wallets generate many keys from a single seed. This documents the long-established scheme for doing that, along with the limitations worth understanding before adopting it.
40 User Wallet Data Synchronization
Moving a wallet between storage providers, or keeping two of them in step, otherwise needs custom code for every pairing. This defines a resumable synchronisation protocol so independent providers can exchange wallet state directly.
153 Action Reference Labels for BRC-100 Wallets
When an app asks a wallet to build a transaction, the wallet hands back a temporary token needed to finish or cancel that transaction later. If the app crashes, loses memory, or the signing process gets interrupted before that token is used, there was previously no standard way to get it back, leaving the transaction stuck half-finished with no way to complete or cancel it.
155 Pull-Based Receive Discovery
A wallet can hand out a fresh receive address to anyone, but if that sender is a custodial exchange, swap service, or anyone who just sends money without telling the wallet, there is no way for the wallet to notice the payment arrived. Watching every possible address the wallet could ever generate is slow, leaks privacy, and can still miss late payments. This lets a wallet reliably notice payments to addresses it gave out, without the sender's cooperation and without scanning forever.
191 Thoughts on Identity, Privacy and Recovery on the Metanet
Right now, proving who you are online usually means handing over a company's whole account system, your transaction history, or a permanent public record just to buy something or prove a right. If your phone breaks or your provider goes bad, you can lose both your money and years of accumulated app data and relationships, with no clear way to get them back or take them elsewhere.
208 Vault Sub-Accounts
Someone running a wallet app for several separate purposes, a personal account, a shop, a brand, normally ends up juggling a different seed phrase or backup for each one, which is tedious to secure and easy to lose track of. This describes a way for one single backed-up secret to safely produce as many separate, unlinkable accounts as needed, each behaving like its own independent wallet, and for all of them to be found again from that one secret alone.
232 Unsolicited Transaction Delivery to a BRC-169 Mailbox
Sending someone bitcoin, a token, or a digital asset usually means they have to be online and ask for it first, or you need some separate side channel to tell them a payment is coming and how to claim it. This makes it hard to just drop an asset into someone's account the way you'd send an email, especially when the asset involves extra rules about colors, authority, or expiry that both sides need to agree on and check independently.
Usually read alongside
Concepts that keep appearing on the same standards as this one.
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