Wallets That Remember You: A New Decentralized Primitive for Recovery

Somewhere in Singapore, a man keeps half his net worth split across different email drafts.In Berlin, a developer hides twenty-four words inside a freezer bag. In Lagos, a designer mails half her recovery phrase to her cousin.

In their heart of hearts, they know it takes only one accident to lose everything.

We call this seed phrase anxiety.

Seed phrases were never meant to be a mass-market security system. They were introduced in 2013 (BIP39), when crypto had about a million users and the idea of a global, decentralized economy was still theoretical.

12 years later, half a billion people rely on the same ritual. 15% percent of all Bitcoin is already gone, locked behind phrases that no one can remember or recover.

So we have to ask: are seed phrases really responsible self-custody, or a design flaw that punishes human behavior?

Security That Destroys Ownership

A seed phrase is a backup key; a list of words that encode the cryptographic secret controlling a wallet.

It’s mathematically sound but practically impossible. No one can memorize a dozen random words in sequence for years, and every attempt to safely store them creates new ways to lose them.

Digital storage isn’t safe. Password managers get hacked, cloud drives leak, and email drafts stay in centralized databases forever.

Physical storage isn’t better. Ink fades, paper erodes, families snoop, and government officials confiscate.

Each precaution adds another point of failure. The more securely you try to protect your crypto, the more risk you introduce. We’re all just playing security whack-a-mole.

How (and where) on earth is a human supposed to store 12 or 24 words safely?

So, most people stop trying. They take the path of least resistance, leaving their coins on exchanges or fintech apps. If you can’t safely hold your keys, someone else eventually will.

Over time, the entire idea of ownership starts to blur. When surrendering control of your money to a company becomes entrenched as a norm, financial sovereignty fades into philosophy.

What If Wallets Remembered You?

Lost wallets are not bugs. They’re stories of human forgetfulness, accidents, and death.

And yet, we still try to onboard new crypto users and build apps using this same primitive.

So, what if wallets worked differently?

What if they remembered you, your face, your voice, the objects you hold-rather than forcing you to store your seed phrase somewhere unsafe?

This inversion is the idea behind Unforgettable, a new recovery primitive based on Rarimo Protocol, developed by the community behind Freedom Tool - the zero-knowledge voting system deployed in Russia and Iran to enable fair citizen referendums.

The premise is simple: let the protocol bear the burden of memory and precision, and let humans use what they naturally remember.

What Is Unforgettable?

Unforgettable offers a new recovery model for self-custody, reconciling the cypherpunk values of crypto with the realities of scale.

Instead of relying on long, fragile text strings, it lets users recover their wallets through a combination of memorable secrets (for example, biometrics, a short password, or a photo of a familiar object).

No personal or private data ever leaves your device. Unforgettable turns those recovery factors into math locally, generating the same key without storing any raw data.

Recovery becomes invisible, portable, and secure. All without relying on custodians, guardians, or centralized cloud services. (Unforgettable can also layer onto existing seed-phrase wallets, giving users a choice between traditional recovery and memorable secrets.)

What’s So Revolutionary About Unforgettable? Is it just Face ID?

Facial logins have existed for years. Your phone can already recognize your face, and many apps let you use biometrics to sign in.

But that’s not cryptographic recovery. It’s just authentication, a shortcut that works because your private key or password is already stored elsewhere.

Unforgettable doesn’t store anything. Instead, it derives the same private key deterministically from your biometric or object data using a fuzzy extractor.

Here’s what that means in practice:

When you set up Unforgettable, your chosen "memorable factors" are transformed into math on your device.

The raw data - your face, object photo, or password - never leaves your phone and is never uploaded anywhere.

A small piece of helper data is stored publicly, but it’s mathematically useless on its own. Even if stolen, it reveals nothing about your actual inputs.

When you recover, Unforgettable uses that helper data and your new inputs to reconstruct the same cryptographic key - even if the inputs aren’t perfectly identical.

This distinction is why Unforgettable isn’t just another convenience layer.

It’s a true recovery primitive that removes the need for external storage, trusted hardware, or third-party guardians.

You don’t need to "sign in". Your wallet recreates itself using signals only you can generate.

From a security standpoint, it’s as strong as modern cryptography. Combining a face, a familiar object, and a short password gives you a 112-bit security baseline, equivalent to the standards banks and exchanges rely on.

For attackers, brute-forcing such a combination would require astronomical computing power and cost. Optional proof-of-work steps make that cost grow exponentially.

Because Unforgettable runs entirely on-device, it integrates seamlessly with smart-contract and seed-phrase wallets. You can adopt it as an alternative recovery path or replace the old one entirely.

No new blockchain, no central authority - just recovery that respects the principle of self-custody.

In short:

Biometric logins recognize you. Unforgettable remembers you.

People Who Needed This Yesterday

Unforgettable acknowledges the failures of an industry that confuses ’secure’ with ’usable’, building around human fallibility and the messy world we live in.

A crypto trader crosses a border to attend conferences. If he loses his phone, he can’t access his funds (remaining at the mercy of the market) because he’s not willing to carry his seed phrase around.

With Unforgettable, scanning his face reconstructs the key. No paper trail, no evidence to attract thieves or corrupt border officials.

A crypto dad wants to set up a legacy Bitcoin wallet for his daughter. He knows a seed phrase won’t survive 18 years of family life.With Unforgettable, the recovery key can be photos of himself, his wife, and his daughter. No one else will ever know it exists.

A blockchain developer building a new app sees users drop off when told to store 24 words, but he refuses to implement centralized recovery.With Unforgettable, users can set up recovery instantly inside the app. Web2-like onboarding, Web3-level privacy.

These are not hypotheticals but problems that already exist, painfully.

The Moment We’re In

Ironically, seed phrases, the very tool meant to enable self-custody, have spawned a trillion-dollar industry built on the fear of losing your own money.

Today, CEXes hold hundreds of billions in user assets, while decentralized exchanges account for barely one-sixth of monthly trading volume.

This concentration persists despite KYC regulations favoring self-custody.

As an industry, we didn’t capitulate to force. Decentralization is collapsing under UX so brittle that people are fleeing back to custodians for safety.

It’s time to rethink the fundamental custodial primitive we’re scaling on.

If crypto’s first decade was about proving decentralization could work and removing trust, what it needs next are tools that restore trust between humans and the technologies meant to serve them.

The next era of crypto won’t assume people can think like machines; it will design systems built around the way our brains work.

This is the quiet turning point for financial sovereignty.

Let’s make recovery Unforgettable.