Recovery & sign-in
Without a seed phrase, recovery rests on two things: a key you still have, and a public record of which keys belong to your wallet.
What’s recorded when you create a wallet
Your wallet’s address is computed from all the keys you create it with. So that any one of those keys can find the wallet again later, creating a wallet writes a record to a public registry contract on Gnosis Chain: each key’s public key, the wallet’s address, its name, and the signed registration data. The registry has no owner and cannot be edited or deleted. (The full list of what is public is on create your wallet.)
Vela’s public-key index service submits that record and pays its gas; the record itself lives on-chain, and any app can read it directly.
Signing in on a new device
- Open Vela and choose to sign in.
- Use any one of your keys: a passkey that synced to this device, a phone nearby (scan the QR code), or your security key.
- Vela works out that key’s public key from the signature, looks it up — first in Vela’s index, then, if the index doesn’t answer, in the registry contract on Gnosis and then on Ethereum — and rebuilds the wallet. It checks that the keys it found really compute to the recorded address before showing it to you.
Account lists aren’t synced between devices; signing in rebuilds them.
Copies of the record
The registry on Gnosis is the one the apps read first. From Settings, you can also copy your wallet’s record to the same registry contract on Ethereum, paying the gas yourself, so the record exists on a second chain. Anyone can make such a copy; it contains nothing that can move funds.
The honest limits
What makes that unlikely is having more than one way in:
- Keep passkey sync on if you use this device’s passkey. It’s what carries the key to a new phone or computer.
- Secure the account behind it. Whoever controls your Apple or Google account may be able to use a synced passkey; give it a strong password and its own recovery options.
- Create the wallet with more than one key, for example your phone’s passkey and a hardware security key kept somewhere safe. Keys can only be added when you create the wallet (why). Remember that any single key can sign on its own — and can’t be removed, so if one is ever compromised, move your funds to a new wallet (what to do).
What Vela can and cannot do
- Can: keep the index running, so your wallet is found quickly on a new device.
- Cannot: move your funds or freeze your wallet by itself, add or remove keys, or recover a key you have lost. Vela holds no key and no role on your Safe; it does write and serve the software that asks your keys to sign.
Next: clear signing.