Lee McCulloch from the Stellar Development Foundation presents SEP30, a key management standard designed to make account recovery user-friendly by using device keys and recovery signers instead of backing up master keys, enabling wallets like Vibrant to offer phone/email-based recovery without custodial risk.
In this SDF engineering talk, Lee McCulloch explains SEP30 (Stellar Ecosystem Proposal 30), a new standard for user-friendly key management in Stellar wallets. SEP30 shifts focus from backing up a single master key to managing device keys and recovery signers, allowing users to recover accounts through phone number or email verification without needing recovery phrases or trusting a single server. The approach uses two independent recovery servers with limited signing weights, ensuring no single entity controls the account. McCulloch walks through a detailed example with a user named Alice, showing how SEP30 enables seamless account recovery when a device is lost. The standard is already implemented in the Vibrant wallet, a non-custodial USD savings wallet on Stellar. SEP30 aims to bring non-custodial wallets closer to the user experience of mainstream consumer applications while maintaining security and decentralization.