Recovery

What happens when a key is lost, stolen, or compromised. How the 7-day cooling period works. How to export a sovereign descriptor and leave Coinhost entirely.

When to start recovery

Recovery is the right answer when one of your keys is gone:

• You lost or destroyed your phone and the cloud backup won't restore.
• Your hardware wallet is lost, stolen, or the device fails.
• You believe a key has been compromised (malware, phishing, social engineering).

If two of your keys are gone at once, recovery via Coinhost is not possible — and you should use sovereign recovery to see if the remaining single key is enough for forensic work. This is why two-key loss is the failure mode we design hardest against.

The recovery flow

Step 1. Initiate

From Settings → Recovery, tap Initiate recovery. Choose which key is missing. You'll answer your three security questions.

Step 2. Cooling period begins

Every vault participant receives an immediate alert email. A 7-day cooling window starts — during which you receive daily reminder emails (days 1–6) and a final warning on day 6.

Step 3. Day 7 — sign

On day 7, Coinhost's HSM releases a co-signature. Together with your remaining key (mobile or hardware), this satisfies the 2-of-3 threshold and lets you build a replacement vault and sweep funds into it.

# Example: lost hardware wallet
day 0   initiate recovery → alerts out
day 1-6 daily reminder emails, cancel available
day 7   HSM signs + mobile key signs
        sweep transaction broadcast
        new vault created with fresh hardware key

Key rotation

Recovery always ends in key rotation. You don't get a new copy of the lost key — you get a new vault with a replacement key, and the old addresses are swept to it. This is a deliberate choice: assume the lost key is compromised, not just missing.

Rotation cost

Rotation is an on-chain sweep of all UTXOs in the old vault into the new one. You pay miner fees. For vaults with many small UTXOs this can add up — do not ignore the coin-control screen.

Emergency lockdown

Separate from recovery: if you believe you're under active threat (coercion, device seizure, phishing in progress), trigger Emergency Lockdown from the app.

• All vaults freeze immediately. No sends permitted.
• Auto-unlock in 72 hours.
• Early unlock requires security questions and a 48-hour delay.

Lockdown is designed to buy you time during a live attack. It's not a substitute for PIN + biometrics as normal security.

Sovereign recovery

The escape hatch. Sovereign recovery exports your vault's descriptor — the complete specification that any P2WSH-compatible wallet needs to reconstruct the vault and derive the same addresses. No Coinhost service required.

From Vault settings → Sovereign recovery → Export, Coinhost emails you:

• The full output descriptor (all three xpubs, derivation paths, threshold).
• A snapshot of current receive and change address indices.
• The UTXO set at time of export.
• Step-by-step instructions for rebuilding the vault in Sparrow, Electrum, or Specter.

# Example descriptor (anonymized)
wsh(sortedmulti(2,
  [a1f04c92/48h/0h/0h/2h]xpub6D.../<0;1>/*,
  [8c9e3122/48h/0h/0h/2h]xpub6C.../<0;1>/*,
  [hsm00001/48h/0h/0h/2h]xpub6E.../<0;1>/*
))

If you open this in Sparrow and load your mobile key + hardware wallet, you can sign a 2-of-2 spend of everything in the vault — without Coinhost's key, without Coinhost's infrastructure, without Coinhost's permission. That's the point.

Getting help

During private beta, reach us at support@coinhost.com — during business hours. For security issues, security@coinhost.com with our PGP key published at coinhost.com/security.asc.