The seed phrase made self-custody possible — and made one secret a single point of failure. This 5-part series covers the primitives that go beyond it: multi-party computation, passkeys, and smart-account social recovery, and how to combine them into a 2026 threat model.
The seed phrase made self-custody possible but concentrates everything in one catastrophic failure point. This guide maps the primitives that go beyond it.
9 min read · intermediate
MPC wallets split signing so the private key never exists whole. TSS vs Shamir, 2-of-3 share layouts, and who holds what — real security or relocated trust?
10 min read · intermediate
Passkeys crush phishing and passwords, but a single passkey as your only crypto key inherits cloud-sync recovery risk. Treat it as a factor, not the key.
8 min read · intermediate
Safe, Argent, and Coinbase Smart Wallet each offer seedless recovery — but their guardian models, time-locks, and trust assumptions differ sharply.
8 min read · intermediate
Build a personal crypto wallet threat model for 2026: a profile-based stack picker and an 8-point checklist that engineers redundancy over memorisation.
7 min read · intermediate
