At EthGlobal Cannes, the Self team offered $10K in bounties to developers who integrated Self’s privacy-preserving identity verification solutions. Co-founder and Head of Engineering Rèmi Colin presented the “ Verify Identities Onchain Using Self SDK” workshop, offering potential applications of the infrastructure and guidance on how builders can seamlessly integrate using Self’s quickstart documentation. 

The first-place award for “Best Self Onchain SDK integration” went to Sebastian S., Baptiste F., and Youssef E., who first met at the Zuzalu pop-up city and connected over their shared desire to create an efficient, user-friendly social recovery tool for self-custodial crypto wallets. 

That joint mission led them to develop BackupBuddy, their award-winning project, which enables users to securely back up and recover their crypto seed phrase with help from trusted friends and family––no technical expertise required. BackupBuddy splits a user’s seed phrase and encrypts each share with your passport, verified via Self with zero-knowledge proofs on Celo. Guardians simply store their share as a QR code in their Apple or Google Wallet, and can return it with a single tap: no apps, passwords, or crypto knowledge required. Only the user can initiate recovery, ensuring full control without relying on centralized custody.

After awarding their prize, Self discussed the impetus for building BackupBuddy and the team’s long-term roadmap for the solution with creators Sebastian, Baptiste, and Youssef.  

What inspired you to develop BackupBuddy?

We are very captivated by making crypto genuinely usable for everyone, and that necessarily involves vastly improving recovery and backup solutions for crypto wallets. It's impossible to think we could onboard the next billion users without having default backup solutions that don't require users to be technical (or have technical friends and guardians), or write down their seed phrase (and expect them not to lose the paper for years), or trust a single entity or cloud provider to hold it.

These opinions are also shared by Vitalik Buterin (c.f. https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html) and have been validated by our own experiences trying to get people around us to be guardians. The existing approaches require at least one of the following:

• Entrusting your funds to one or multiple people with zero-day access

• Having technical friends who will still be your friends in 10+ years

• Doxxing your wallets

Overall, it's just difficult, even for technically skilled individuals, to have access to guardians unless their social circle is already deeply involved in crypto. For most people, the individuals they trust most are their family and close friends, who are often not technical and not familiar with crypto, which makes it very hard to rely on them as guardians. Without technical knowledge, setting this up safely becomes nearly impossible.

These are the reasons that inspired us to build BackupBuddy.

When did you decide identity verification was a core pillar necessary to solve for?

Ideally, the best way to recover your account, without having the problems above, is to prove your identity to get your keys back. Nothing comes close to that in terms of recovery because no one can steal your identity, and you will still have the same identity 30 years later when your ledger becomes obsolete and your seed phrase paper (which you forgot about) loses its ink.

In a social recovery scheme, the guardian shares contain no extractable or useful information without the owner's identity. This makes it safe to distribute shares to non-technical users who have no special training in storing digital secrets.

Knowing that, the most important pillar to solve for when it comes to recovery is identity verification.

Why did you choose Self for the identity layer?

One of our team members (Youssef) worked on a solution similar to Self two years ago, with the intent of verifying a zk proof closely tied to your identity (like a passport) onchain to recover a smart account. Before thinking of passports, we even tried to look for governmental emails (to use their DKIM signatures as proofs) containing your identity, but passports proved to be a much better alternative.

A passport is something you already take care of. You know where it is, but you don't always have it on you. Most importantly, for us, it contains your identity, signed by a government that has already verified who you are. These properties are hugely beneficial for recovery, and Self provided the most "passport coverage" and intuitive tooling for using them in our identity verification process.

What's your vision for the future of BackupBuddy

There are still many details to work on and implementation choices to make, but we are committed to bringing a full end-to-end solution for any user who wants simple yet secure backups of their wallets. These solutions would work really well inside existing wallets, so we’re looking at offering our solutions to wallet providers to improve their users' experience.

We believe we will be able to provide both offchain solutions by acting as a trusted custodian and fully onchain solutions for recovering smart accounts like Safes. The Ethereum ecosystem wants to get rid of seed phrases, and that is good news for us, because as accounts get upgraded to smart accounts, ZK proofs tied to identity become all the more important for recovery.

Ultimately, grant every user access to the peace of mind that comes with identity-based social recovery!

Learn more about Self

Start with our Quickstart docs here.

Download the Self mobile app here: iOS + Android.