Wallet Backup & Recovery
Protect user wallets with MPC backup and recovery workflows, including secure share storage, recovery, and best-practice key management.
This section covers how to back up MPC wallets so users can recover them if their signing shares are lost, and how to restore a wallet from backup.
In This Section
| Page | Description |
|---|---|
| Backup Wallet | Generate backup shares, encrypt, and store them |
| Encrypt Shares | AES-256-GCM encryption patterns and key derivation |
| Recover Wallet | Reconstruct signing shares from a backup |
| Best Practices | KMS, passkeys, verification, and multi-backup strategy |
How Backups Work
Backups use a separate MPC round to produce backup shares that are different from — but mathematically linked to — the original signing shares. This means:
- Backup shares cannot be used directly for signing
- Recovery reconstructs new signing shares, not the original ones
- Tatum's backup share is different from its signing share
- Losing backup shares = losing the ability to recover
Create backups immediately after wallet generation, before the user leaves the onboarding flow.
Backup vs Recovery
| Backup | Recovery | |
|---|---|---|
| When | After generateWallet() | When signing shares are lost |
| SDK call | backupWallet() | recoverWallet() |
| Input | Original generateWallet() response | Decrypted backup shares |
| Output | Encrypted backup shares to store | New signing shares to store |