Backup Wallet
A safe-haven for your digital assets.
A complement to Webacy's Wallet Watch, Backup Wallet is a safe haven for your assets in the event that:
You get hacked 👾
You lose your seed phrase or private keys 🔑
You forgot your wallet login 🤔
You cannot access your main wallet ⛔️
You've had an ETH drainer hack on your wallet 💦
Backup Wallet allows a user to set another wallet (that they ideally own and operate, separate from their main one) as a backup. They approve assets within their main wallet to that backup wallet. If the day comes that they lose access, that backup wallet can log into Webacy and recover those assets from the main wallet.
How it works: the user deploys a smart contract that utilizes pre-approvals*. You pre-approve the asset to be transferred to your backup wallet when a certain condition is met (such as loss of access). Only your backup wallet address is able to recover the assets, and no assets are staked, transferred, or locked up in any way.
As a reminder, Webacy is completely key-less: we never see, touch, access, or hold your seed phrase or private keys. Webacy never has the power to act on behalf of the user or access your assets in any situation. All control and power remains in the hands of the user, where it belongs!
Use Cases
Your main wallet gets hacked or suffers an attack: In the event that your main wallet gets hacked, you can use your backup wallet (any non-custodial wallet you've set up through Webacy's dashboard) to move your assets from your main wallet to your backup wallet, using the panic button.
IRL Scenario: Payton receives a Wallet Watch SMS notification that their Pudgy Penguin has been sent from their MetaMask to an unfamiliar wallet address. Realizing this is a hack, Payton goes to the Webacy dashboard, selects the panic button, and his remaining NFTs and assets are immediately ejected to his Coinbase Wallet, which he set up as his Backup Wallet from the Webacy dashboard.
You lose access to your main wallet, seed phrase, or private keys: In the event you lose access to your wallet credentials, you can utilize the backup wallet (any non-custodial wallet you've set up through Webacy's dashboard) to move your protected assets from your main wallet to your backup wallet, allowing you to retrieve the otherwise irretrievable.
IRL Scenario: Spencer's house floods, causing her seed phrase and private keys to her Coinbase Wallet to be lost. Thankfully, she preemptively set up a MetaMask wallet as her Webacy Backup wallet, allowing her to connect as a Backup Wallet, and recover all of her protected assets into her MetaMask.
You've had an "ETH Drainer" hack applied to your wallet: This hack can come in many forms, but the outcome is the same - any ETH in your wallet, and any subsequent ETH you send into your wallet, gets immediately drained and sent to another malicious address. This makes it impossible to pay have enough ETH to pay the gas fees to transfer many of the important tokens and NFTs you may have remaining in your wallet. You can connect with your Backup Wallet and "pull" the assets out from the compromised wallet.
IRL Scenario: Porter accidentally signs a malicious approval and starts to see all of their ETH drain from their wallet into another account. Porter has a lot of important NFTs in their account. Whenever they try to send ETH to pay gas fees to move the NFTs, the ETH gets drained. Porter connects to Webacy through their Backup Wallet, and safely recover all protected assets from the original wallet.
Best Practices: We strongly recommend that users select a Backup Wallet that is completely separate wallet from their main wallet. For example, if Metamask is your main wallet, use a Ledger or Coinbase Wallet as your backup.
Ideally, your backup wallet should have a separate seed phrase, be in a separate extension, or live in a different physical location altogether, such as a hardware wallet.
Setting up your Backup Wallet
Go to dapp.webacy.com and click “Connect Wallet”.
Select your wallet provider (ex: MetaMask, Coinbase or connect via WalletConnect).
Click “Sign” on the prompt in your wallet. This signature is necessary to read the wallet address on-chain and prove ownership of the wallet (like when you connect your wallet to OpenSea!). There are no approvals or transactions associated with the signature.
On the Dashboard, select “Security Hub", and then "Add Backup Wallet". You can also add a Backup Wallet from the "Backup & Panic Button" section.
Enter a name/label for your wallet (make sure it's memorable) and either the corresponding Wallet Address or ENS. After entering the backup wallet information, you can press confirm and add backup.
You may want to add additional backup wallets which you can do here.
Click “Confirm and add backup”. It may take a few seconds to finalize.
Select which assets you want to protect. all assets in your wallet by pressing add everything, or you can go through and choose specific assets that you'd like to protect.
Protect each asset by signing an approval to your backup wallet that you specified in Step 1. By granting access to your backup wallet, you are creating a secure backdoor through which only you can enter.
Finalize the approval protection. Finalizing approvals is what writes and encrypts your information, and ensures your wallet is primed and ready to go when the panic button or backup wallet are called upon. This should take a few seconds to complete.
You can add backup wallets or change your approval settings any time from the Security Hub or Backup & Panic section.
And that's it! Your assets are protected.
See Backup Wallet in action.
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