Why we built Vela
We didn’t set out to build another wallet. We started with a question we could never answer cleanly:
Where are you supposed to keep twelve words?
The honest answer is a screenshot
Put them in Notes and you’re one stolen phone away from trouble. Write them on paper, and now you’re thinking about fire, water, moving apartments, roommates, trash bags, and whether future-you will remember where “the safe place” was.
The honest answer, for a lot of people, is a screenshot in the camera roll. Everyone knows it’s wrong. They do it anyway — because the “right” answer is too hard to live with.
A seed phrase is a secret that has to survive decades of ordinary life without ever being copied, photographed, typed into the wrong box, or read aloud to somebody helpful on the phone. That is not a hard problem for a careful person. It is a hard problem for a person.
Then passkeys changed what a wallet could feel like
We used Base Account every day, and signing with Face ID felt obvious in a way seed phrases never did — less like handling hazardous material, more like using the rest of the internet.
But the more we used it, the more we hit edges we couldn’t ignore:
- a recovery key generated in a browser that you just had to trust,
- no custom networks,
- no way to host it ourselves,
- and the quiet problem that was the biggest one: if the service disappeared, the wallet disappeared with it.
So we built the version we wanted to depend on.
What Vela actually is
Vela is a passkey wallet you can fully own.
Your passkey stays where your device already protects it — iCloud Keychain, Google Password Manager, or a hardware security key you hold. When you sign a transaction, Vela sends a challenge to your device; your device signs it and sends back just the signature. Vela never sees the key itself.
Most wallets still have a dangerous moment, even if it’s brief: words on a screen, a seed phrase in memory, a recovery key sitting in a browser tab. Vela is designed so that moment never exists.
We made Vela open source so you can check that for yourself, and self-hostable so your wallet never depends on our company staying online. And we built on unmodified Safe contracts because the boring, battle-tested path is the right one when people’s money is involved — the same contracts already securing billions on-chain.
The trade-off we chose
There’s still a trade-off, and it would be dishonest to bury it.
With Vela, your Apple or Google account matters, because that’s where a synced passkey lives. Lose that account, or delete the passkey, and there’s no seed phrase, no support reset, no back door.
But every self-custodial wallet asks you to choose which risk you’d rather live with. A seed phrase can be copied, screenshotted, phished, or typed into the wrong site at 1 a.m. A passkey is different: there are no words to reveal, no secret to paste, and no fake site that can trick you into handing it over. Your device signs for the real domain, or it does not sign.
And the choice isn’t binary. A wallet can be created with up to seven signers, any one of which can sign on its own — passkeys on different devices, a nearby phone you scan, or a USB/NFC security key. If you’d rather your wallet didn’t depend on a platform account at all, you can make the very first key a hardware security key. The one condition is timing: your address is derived from the full set of keys, so they’re chosen when you create the wallet.
That’s why Vela exists
A wallet with no seed phrase to hide, no recovery key to trust, and no company you have to hope will stay around forever.
If you want to check the claims rather than take them: the whitepaper has the architecture, Audits & known issues has every contract we depend on and what has and hasn’t been audited, and all of the code is on GitHub.
Next: install Vela.