Ethereum users may no longer need to worry about losing their seed phrases ever again after the Pectra hard fork — thanks to a new "social recovery” feature part of the planned EIP-3074 upgrade.
The Ethereum Improvement Proposal, EIP-3074 was confirmed as a new addition to the Pectra hard fork by Ethereum core developer Tim Beiko in an April 11 X post.
The upgrade will see a “supercharging” of ordinary Ethereum wallets (externally owned accounts) with several new smart contracts capabilities, including the ability to recover assets, Ethereum Foundation researcher “Domothy” explained in a March 25 blog post.
However, to leverage the social recovery tool, users must first have transferred ownership of their assets to an invoker contract via a digital signature, which will perform future transactions and function calls on the user’s behalf.
While ownership is delegated, the message in the digital signature will enable the user to retrieve their assets if they lose or forget their seed phrase.
The feature will be made possible by the implementation of the “AUTH” and “AUTHCALL” opcodes, cryptocurrency commentator cygaar explained in an April 11 X post.
AUTH will take a user’s signature and intended action and verify it was signed properly. AUTHCALL will then call the target contract to carry out the transaction but will assign the user as the caller instead of the invoker contract.