Timelock Recovery

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).

How It Works

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

Alert/Initiate Transaction — sends the funds from the wallet to itself (consolidating the UTXOs).
Recovery Transaction — 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).

Important Notes

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:

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

Therefore, after creating a Timelock Recovery plan, it is strongly recommended that you do not use this wallet for day-to-day activities. Instead, use a separate wallet for daily use (with a seed stored somewhere your loved ones can easily find). Once you have accumulated enough funds for long-term storage, move them to a highly secure wallet (e.g., protected by a long passphrase that only you memorize), and then create a Recovery Plan for that highly secure wallet. This recovery plan, when initiated, should either move funds back to the daily-use wallet, send them to a different inheritor’s wallet, or transfer them to a custodian, etc.

Demos

Electrum Wallet + Trezor Safe 3

Specter Wallet (technical demo starts at 12:08)

Recovery Plan Examples

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

recovery.pdf recovery.json cancellation.pdf cancellation.json

Technical Details

Description in BIP-128.

Supported Wallets

Electrum Wallet: starting from version 4.6.0b1
Specter Desktop: under development — source PR

Block Explorers

You can enter the transaction id in the following websites to manually check if the Alert Transaction has been broadcasted:

Apps and Watchtower Services

Get an automatic alert if the Alert Transaction has been broadcasted: