Recovery with Guardians is this easy:

Download the Argent app on your new phone. Tap ‘Recover wallet’. Enter your username (e.g. natasha.argent.xyz). Speak to your Guardians and share the four emojis on your screen. If a majority confirm they match, then a 36 hour window starts. (You count towards the majority). During this time you can cancel the recovery. If there’s no cancellation, you recover your wallet.

Approving or cancelling a recovery requires a majority out of you and your Guardians. This is because it makes the system even more secure. How this works is that you and your Guardians can each sign an instruction to the smart contract, e.g. ‘Yes, this recovery attempt is legitimate’.

Therefore, the formula for approving or cancelling a recovery is: CEIL[(n+1)/2] signatures.

signatures. N = total number of Guardians

Now you’re protected from the risk of losing access to your funds. But that’s not all Argent protects you from.

How Argent protects you from theft

1) Phone-layer security

The aim of this layer is to prevent someone from logging in and draining your wallet. This layer alone puts us on par with world class banking apps.

We use all the available security features on iOS and Android, such as biometrics, keychain, and Secure Enclave, as well as a six-digit user pin code. The pin code helps to encrypt the private key (for those of you interested in cryptography: we use PBKDF2 and AES256 in Galois/Counter Mode).

But while these features should prevent the vast majority of attacks from happening, they’re not unique to Argent.

So what separates Argent from other wallets?

2) Smart contract-layer security

Argent uses smart contracts to provide the security features of the best modern banks — without the bank. The smart contracts are built on the Ethereum blockchain and cannot be tampered with, by us or anybody else.

Wallet locking

You can ask a Guardian to lock your wallet. The wallet can’t then make transactions. This is useful in case your phone is lost or stolen and you want to protect it beyond the phone-layer security.

When a Guardian locks a wallet, a 5-day security period starts. This gives you time to get a new phone and recover your wallet. (Locking doesn’t prevent recovery, for precisely this reason).

Any Guardian can unlock a wallet, including the one that originally locked it.

Daily transaction limits

Each wallet has a daily transaction limit, which you can change to whatever you like. Limits prevent an attacker from siphoning off your funds.

Transactions are totalled across tokens, and transactions over the limit are delayed for 24 hours. When the limit is hit you’re instantly sent an alert to review the transaction. You can then use the 24 hour delay to block it, if you want to, by locking your wallet.

If you’ve gone over your limit and don’t want to wait 24 hours for your transaction, you can use your Guardians to quickly approve it. A majority of Guardians is required. This is to prevent any risk from a compromised Guardian.

Changing a limit also has a 24 hour delay. This stops someone from gaining access to your phone, lifting the limit and stealing the funds before you have time to lock your wallet.

Trusted contacts

An attacker trying to steal your funds would send them to an address you don’t know — otherwise it would be obvious who the attacker is. Argent’s smart contracts therefore treat unknown addresses differently to known, trusted ones. Transactions to your trusted contacts don’t count towards your daily limit.

Changing Guardians

You can change your Guardians with just a couple of taps of the app. Changes take 24 hours to come into effect. The delay gives you time to prevent any unwanted changes by locking your wallet.

The only time there is no delay is when you first download Argent, then adding your first Guardian is immediate. This is to ensure you can benefit from the security they bring as soon as possible.