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Wallet recovery

Crank is non-custodial: your wallet's keys and seed phrase never reach Crank, so Crank cannot restore a lost wallet for you. What Crank can recover is your Crank account -- its settings, agents, strategies and history -- by moving it to a backup wallet you linked in advance.

This page covers:

Recovery keys

A recovery key is a second wallet that you control, linked to your Crank account as its backup. Link one before you need it.

To link one, open Settings on crank.ing and add a recovery key:

  1. Enter the backup wallet's address and an optional label.
  2. Sign the link request with your primary wallet.
  3. Sign it again with the backup wallet.

Both signatures are required, so nobody can attach a wallet they do not control, or attach one to your account without your primary wallet. Crank stores only the backup wallet's public address -- never a key.

You can link up to two recovery keys. A newly linked key cannot start a recovery until its activation window has passed, so a key added by someone who briefly gained access to your account cannot be used straight away.

Recovering an account

If your primary wallet is lost or compromised, go to crank.ing/recover and connect a wallet you previously linked as a recovery key.

  1. Start. Sign the recovery request with the backup wallet. You do not need to be signed in. The page responds the same way whether or not the wallet is linked, so it cannot be used to discover which accounts exist.
  2. Lockdown. Starting a recovery immediately suspends every agent wallet on the account and signs out every session. Only one recovery can be in progress for an account at a time.
  3. Time-lock. The account transfers to the backup wallet only after a time-lock, currently 72 hours. The page shows when it is due.
  4. Transfer. When the time-lock ends, your account -- settings, agents, strategies and history -- moves to the backup wallet. Agents stay suspended until you review and resume them.

A recovery moves your account, not funds or keys. Funds held in the old wallet stay in that wallet; move them yourself if you still can. If the backup wallet already has its own Crank account or data, the recovery is held for review rather than merged.

Cancelling a recovery you did not start

Every recovery step -- linking a key, starting, cancelling and completing a recovery -- triggers a security alert on every notification channel you have set up. These alerts cannot be switched off.

If you receive one and did not start the recovery:

  1. Sign in to crank.ing with your primary wallet.
  2. In Settings, use This wasn't me -- cancel recovery and sign the cancel request.

Only the primary wallet can cancel. Cancelling resumes your suspended agents, and the recovery key that started the recovery is revoked automatically. Sessions that were signed out stay signed out, so sign in again on each device.

iPhone backup

Status: Rolling out

The Crank iPhone app keeps its wallet seed on your device and gives you a recovery path that never sends key material to Crank.

  • Shamir split. The seed is split into three shares, and any two of them recover it. One share stays on the device behind Face ID, one is kept in your own iCloud Keychain, and one is shown to you once to write down and store offline.
  • Passkey backup. A passkey-protected backup route is built into the app and switches on as the app rolls out.

No share, seed or passkey secret is ever sent to a Crank service. Losing one share is recoverable from the other two; losing two is not, and Crank cannot help, because Crank never holds any of them.

This is separate from recovery keys: the iPhone backup restores your wallet, while a recovery key restores your Crank account to a different wallet. Use both for full coverage.