Community FAQ

The following section covers some likely questions we imagine people may have.

About Wallet

• What happens if I lose access to my cloud storage or delete my encrypted keys? You’ll always be able to recover your wallet using social recovery with guardians. If you haven’t activated your Base Vault (our existing, Layer 1 wallet) as you only have an L2 wallet, you’ll need to activate your L1 wallet. This will require a gas fee but will let you recover successfully from there. Once you’ve recovered your wallet, you can set up off-chain recovery again.

• Can Apple or Google delete my encrypted private keys? In the extremely unlikely event that Apple or Google deleted your encrypted private keys, you could always recover your account by using guardians.

• Can Apple or Google take my assets? No. Accessing your assets requires the encrypted keys stored on the cloud and the KEK that Base holds. We can always delete your KEK if you suspect someone getting into your cloud storage.

• How can I recover my wallet if iCloud or Google Drive goes down? You can use social recovery (with gas) or wait until cloud storage goes back online.

• Can I use separate email addresses for Base and cloud storage? Yes. The email you use for Base and the cloud storage can be different.

• Can I disable the off-chain recovery method for my wallet? For existing users, it's opt-in. For future users, it will be set up automatically, but you can just delete the encrypted keys from your cloud storage and disable it that way.

• How is it different from Cloud-based recovery using standard Ethereum wallets? With some standard Ethereum wallets, you have a password that encrypts your seed phrase. It is used to unlock your wallet. If you lose your password and seed phrase, you lose everything.

• What happens if I’m a victim of a SIM swap scam - can they recover my wallet? We’ve made sure to layer up security throughout the recovery process to eliminate a single point of failure like a SIM swap.