Timelock Recovery Logo

Timelock Recovery is a mechanism which, in case of a catastrophic event (death or loss of your master key), can send your Bitcoin to a secondary wallet of your choice after a time-window (i.e. 90 days).

During that time-window, you can see that the Timelock Recovery mechanism has been triggered (a transaction from your wallet to itself is created on the Bitcoin blockchain), and if this has happened against your will, you can use your master key to cancel the process (by moving the funds elsewhere before the time-window expires).

The implementation of Timelock Recovery is done with two transactions that are signed in advance, but broadcasted only when needed:

  1. An Alert/Initiate Transaction which sends the funds from the wallet to itself (consolidating the UTXOs).
  2. A Recovery Transaction which sends the funds to a secondary wallet of your choice and can be added to the blockchain only X days after the Alert Transaction has been broadcasted (and mined).

Since Timelock Recovery plans do not require any involvement of a third party, they can be implemented in any Bitcoin wallet. However, two precautions should be taken:

  1. Due to the way Bitcoin UTXOs work, spending funds from the wallet might break the entire recovery plan.
  2. Adding more funds to the wallet will not be covered by the Timelock Recovery plan.

Therefore it is highly recommended not to use the wallet for daily purposes after creating a Timelock Recovery plan. Instead, for daily purposes use a separate wallet (with a seed in a place that your loved ones could easily find) and only after accumulating enough funds relevant for long-term storage, move them to a highly secure wallet (i.e. with a long passphrase that only you memorize). The Recovery Plan should then be created for the highly secure wallet, and send the funds back to the daily-purpose wallet, to inheritors’ wallet, or to a custodian etc.

Watch the demo for Electrum Wallet + Trezor Safe 3:

Watch the demo for Specter Wallet (technical demo starts at 12:08):

Recovery Plan examples

These are examples of Timelock Recovery plans generated by the extensions:

Supported wallets

Block explorers to manually check if the Alert Transaction has been broadcasted

You can enter the transaction id in the following websites:

Apps and watchtower services to get an automatic alert if the Alert Transaction has been broadcasted