Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has stressed the importance of having a diverse set of “gatekeepers” to maximize the security of self-custody of crypto assets through multisig and social recovery wallets.
Given the increasing rate of scams and crypto hacks in recent years, and several important Crypto companies go bankrupt in 2022The importance of self-custody and maintaining sufficient wallet security procedures has never been more important.
In a Reddit from March 16 mail In the r/ethereum community titled “How I Think About Choosing Guardians for Multisig and Social Recovery Wallets,” Buterin gave a detailed rundown of how he approaches wallet security.
Self-care is important. And social and multisig recovery is a great way to do that.
A quick reddit post on my take on choosing tutors for social recovery and multisig wallets:https://t.co/FY1iyJ6BFC
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 17, 2023
While their structures differ, Multisig wallets and social recovery wallets rely on guardians, which essentially serve as external sources to recover funds or approve transactions. In general, keepers can be sets of external wallets owned by the same person or addresses controlled by other people/entities.
According to Buterin, it's important to decentralize your wallet keepers, as having more than one of your keepers provides a "tricky trade-off: you may trust other people less, but you're also concentrating more power on yourself, which can create a risk if you get hacked, coerced or incapacitated or die.”
"My general rule of thumb is that enough guardians should be controlled by other people so that if you go missing, there are enough guardians left to get your funds back."
Buterin went on to advise that someone's gatekeeper group not know each other as this "greatly reduces the risk of them colluding" to attack your wallets and assets, however they should still be able to find each other in the event of something . passing to the owner of the wallet.
“If something happens to you, they will still be able to meet, because there are obvious standard protocols that naturally come to mind for people in such a situation (for example, communicating with their family),” he wrote.
Also, the co-founder of ethereum suggested that people should “instruct tutors to ask a security question” that only they and the tutor will know when confirming an operation, and only confirm when the correct answer is given.
Related: DeFi Sees Its Biggest Hack In 2023 As Euler Loses $197 Million: Finance Redefined
For degen traders, or those who don't HODL games long-term, the Ethereum co-founder also stressed that they should use gatekeepers that can respond quickly to meet their fast-moving needs.
“If you're doing degen things with on-chain contracts, you may need to act quickly: withdraw money if a contract has a vulnerability, move money if it's close to being liquidated, etc. If your needs include this, then you want to find tutors who can act quickly on short notice.”
Finally, Buterin recommended evaluating each tutor at least once a year, as this will confirm that "they have not forgotten or lost their accounts."
Given the increasing rate of scammers and hackers in recent years, and several cryptocurrency companies going bankrupt in the past year, the importance of maintaining sufficient wallet security procedures has never been more important.
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