Backing Up Without a Seed Phrase: What Guardians Replace and What They Do Not

You cannot back this wallet up without the phrase. The rest of the page is what that means and what to do instead, and the application makes the same admission before you get here.

What the backup screen says, quoted

Its own words:

This preview generates your recovery phrase on-device and never stores it, not in this browser, not on any server. If you didn't write it down at creation, reset the wallet and create a new demo wallet.

There is no reveal button because there is nothing to reveal. The code comment behind that panel says as much: the absence is stated plainly instead of faking a reveal flow.

That is the right behaviour and it is worth naming, because the alternative, a wallet that can show you your phrase later, is a wallet that had your phrase all along.

What guardians actually back up

Your identity. A threshold of guardians can rebind your identifier to a new key, which restores who you are, your credential catalogue and your guardian set.

Not your balance. The identity key never holds or moves value, so guardians cannot restore an account they were never able to touch. The full explanation is its own page, and the policy dialog states it correctly too.

So the honest framing is that guardians are a backup for your identity and the phrase is the backup for everything else. They are not alternatives. They cover different things, and a page implying guardians make the phrase optional would be the most expensive sentence on this site.

The checklist, and why it is not decoration

The backup screen shows a checklist. It is computed from real state rather than being a static graphic: the guardian count comes from the store, and only guardians the backend reports as confirmed are counted.

The mapping from the backend's confirmed status to the interface's active status is an explicit conversion, so an invitation nobody accepted does not inflate the number.

What to actually do

Write the phrase on paper at creation, because that is the only moment it exists outside memory. Two copies, two locations, neither photographed.

Set a recovery policy so your identity survives losing the paper, and test it rather than assuming it works.

Accept that these are separate protections. Losing the paper and keeping your guardians means keeping your identity and losing your balance. Keeping the paper and losing your guardians means the opposite is never needed.

And on this testnet none of it is worth anything yet