FAQ
Is Vela self-custodial?
Yes. Your wallet is a smart account controlled by a key that only you can use, held by your device’s OS and never seen by Vela. Vela cannot move, freeze, or recover your funds.
Is my wallet a normal account or a contract?
It’s a Safe smart account (a smart contract), operated with ERC-4337 account abstraction. That’s what lets you sign with a passkey, read every transaction before approving it, and use the same address on every network. See the whitepaper for the architecture.
Is there really no seed phrase?
Really. Your signing key is a passkey held by your device’s OS, and Vela never sees it. There’s no twelve-word phrase to write down, lose, or have phished. Read how passkeys work for why that’s safe.
What happens if I lose my phone?
If your passkey is synced through iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager, you sign in on a new device with the same account and your wallet comes back. See recovery & sign-in for the full model and its limits.
Which networks and tokens are supported?
Vela ships with 12 EVM networks — Ethereum, BNB Chain, Polygon, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Avalanche, Gnosis, Unichain, Tempo, Monad, and World Chain — plus custom networks, holding native tokens and ERC-20s. Your address is the same on all of them. See networks & fees.
How much does it cost?
The wallet is free and Vela has no token. You pay network gas, in each network’s native token, out of your own wallet balance, plus a relayer fee set to roughly the network fee itself — so about 2× the on-chain cost, shown as a clear network fee / relayer fee / total split before you confirm (the price is quoted by the bundler, and the wallet refuses anything above ~3× the network rate). Each network also needs a small, non-refundable deposit to activate its gas relayer account (Vela may sponsor this for new users); because that account can run down, you may have to top it up again later — it isn’t strictly one-time. Details in networks & fees.
What can Vela (the company) see or do?
Vela stores your passkey’s public key and the name you chose, to enable cross-device sign-in. It cannot see your private key, your balances are read from public chains, and there’s no email signup. The privacy policy is the authoritative version.
Is Vela open source?
Yes — the wallet and all three backend services (chain data, passkey index, bundler) are public on GitHub under the MIT license, and you can self-host them.