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Monday, June 9, 2025

The pitch was simple: What if you lose your keys? Don’t worry—your trusted friends will help you get back in. Cute. But in practice, “social recovery” has become the crypto equivalent of leaving your door unlocked because your neighbors seem nice.

You think guardians are some decentralized miracle?
They’re just a multisig of human error.

Let’s be honest: most users pick guardians who are either clueless, careless, or compromised already. Your old college roommate. Your boss. That one dev friend who still hasn’t moved off MetaMask hot wallets.

You think they’re keeping your keys safe?
They can’t even keep their Discord account from getting hijacked by a fake airdrop.

Guardian collusion is the obvious play—three out of five phone calls, and boom, they’ve reset your wallet. No need to hack you directly. Just find the weakest links you picked and let them hand over the goods. One fake email. One fake tweet. One deepfake voice note. And it’s game over.

Still feel “social”?

And even if you do trust your guardians—should you? The UX-first movement turned your security model into a lifestyle app. Smooth interfaces, animated confirmations, email recovery options. All because seed phrases are “too hard.”

Here’s the thing: UX and security are enemies when one is driving the car and the other’s locked in the trunk.

The promise was usability without compromise.
The result? A wide attack surface, gift-wrapped with onboarding candy.

Projects want you to feel safe.
Attackers want you to feel comfortable.
And comfort is the most dangerous opsec flaw of all.

Let’s not pretend it ends with phishing.
What happens when guardians die? Ghost their phones? Lose access themselves?
You thought you avoided single points of failure.
You just outsourced them to other people.

Social recovery isn’t broken because of implementation bugs or rough edge cases.
It’s broken by design — because it trusts humans more than machines in a system that was explicitly built to eliminate human trust.

You don’t solve key loss by adding more humans.
You solve it with cryptography, not crowdsourcing.

But sure—go ahead.

Let your barber and your ex-girlfriend hold your wallet recovery access.

What could go wrong?

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•Crocodilus malware goes global with new crypto, banking heist features [Read more]

•Circle seeks $7.2 billion valuation in upsized IPO [Read more]

•MONTH IN REVIEW: TOP DEFI HACKS OF MAY 2025
One Bad Line of Code. One Bribed Employee. Hundreds of Millions Gone. Four hacks, a $20M bounty, and the return of DPRK devs. May’s biggest breaches weren’t new — they were familiar code paths nobody patched.

•Behind the Mask: SlowMist Reveals How a Fake Security Expert Tricked Crypto Users
A scammer impersonated experts, spoofed tools, and scripted fear — not to steal your tokens directly, but to make yougive them away.

•5 Circom Security Pitfalls That Can Break Your Proofs
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•Solodit Checklist Explained: Reentrancy Attack
A single fallback hijacks your flow, slips past your nonReentrant, and drains the protocol clean. Because you trusted your order of operations.

•Breaking Down the Deceptive Tactics of 37K Phishing Contracts and How to Defend Against Them
Welcome to the Age of Malicious Multicall. Forget fake tokens—today’s phishing ops use smart contracts disguised as “Claim” buttons to drain your wallet in a single tap. One approval, and it’s over.

50,000 BTC. One popcorn tin. One dumb mistake. James Jong’s decade-long silence ended with a $200 slip. Now the feds have the stash — and the story is wilder than you think.

We provide an anonymous platform for whistleblowers and DeFi detectives to present their information to the community. All authors remain anonymous. 
We are all rekt.