What a Recovery Contact is

A Recovery Contact is a trusted person — a friend, family member, partner, or anyone you trust — who agrees to help safeguard your wallet's recovery. They install the Ryder app on their phone, you tap your Ryder One against their phone, and an encrypted piece of your backup is stored with them.

That encrypted piece is worth 25% of your recovery. Two Contacts together are worth 50%, four are worth a full 100%.

Crucially, what they hold is encrypted and incomplete. They cannot use it to access your wallet, even if they wanted to.

How Contacts fit into the recovery model

With Recovery Contacts in your setup, you gain new ways to recover your wallet on top of the standard Tag-and-phone path. Valid recovery paths including Contacts:

• 1 Tag + 2 Contacts (50% + 25% + 25%)
• Phone + 2 Contacts (50% + 25% + 25%)
• 4 Contacts (25% × 4)

This is especially powerful in worst-case scenarios. If you lose your phone and all your Tags, four Recovery Contacts can still bring your wallet back. No traditional hardware wallet offers that kind of resilience.

How setup works

Adding a Recovery Contact is a three-step in-person process:

1. Your contact downloads the Ryder app on their phone.
2. They start the Recovery Contact process in the app.
3. You tap your Ryder One on their phone via NFC. That's it.

The encrypted piece is transferred directly between your Ryder One and their phone via NFC — it never travels over the internet, never passes through Ryder's servers, and never exists on any system you don't control.

After the in-person setup, the encrypted piece is synced to your contact's iCloud or Google Drive. This means if they replace their phone, they'll still hold your piece — no need to redo the setup.

What your contacts can and can't do

Can:

• Help you recover your wallet when you ask them to.
• Replace their phone without affecting your backup (the encrypted piece is synced to their cloud).

Can't:

• Access your wallet on their own.
• See your balance, transactions, or any wallet details.
• Recover your wallet without your participation and other backup pieces.
• Use what they hold for anything outside the recovery process.

This is the entire point of social recovery done right: trust without exposure. Your contacts help you in an emergency without ever having power over your funds.

How many Contacts should you have?

There's no fixed answer, but here's how to think about it:

• 2 Contacts is the minimum that meaningfully adds to your recovery (combined with a Tag or your phone, two Contacts complete a 100% recovery path).
• 4 Contacts gives you a complete recovery path that doesn't require any of your own physical or digital items — useful for travelers, or as ultimate fallback.
• More than 4 adds redundancy in case one of your contacts becomes unreachable. Each additional Contact is another recovery option in your back pocket.

The more Contacts you add, the more resilient you become to unexpected scenarios — like a Contact moving abroad, losing touch, or, in the worst cases, being unable to help.

Who should you choose?

Pick people who are:

• Reachable. You should be able to contact them when you need them, even if you've lost your phone.
• Reliable. They should be the kind of person who responds to messages and shows up when asked.
• Trustworthy with the knowledge. While Contacts can't access your wallet, the act of being a Recovery Contact reveals that you hold crypto. Choose people you're comfortable knowing that fact.

Good candidates include close family, long-time friends, or a partner. Less good candidates include casual acquaintances, distant relatives, or anyone you wouldn't trust to keep a sensitive secret.

What if a contact loses access to their phone?

Each Contact's encrypted piece is synced to their iCloud or Google Drive, so a lost or replaced phone usually isn't a problem — they sign back in to their cloud and the piece is restored.

If a Contact loses access entirely (forgotten cloud password with no recovery, etc.), you've lost one of your recovery paths but not your wallet — as long as your other pieces still combine to 100%. This is why we recommend having more than the bare minimum: redundancy among Contacts protects you from any single one becoming unreachable.

What happens if you want to change a Recovery Contact?

Once a Recovery Contact has been set up, the encrypted piece they hold lives on their phone and in their cloud. You can't remotely revoke or delete it — only your Contact can remove the data from their own device.

This sounds concerning at first, but in practice it's fine for two reasons:

• The piece is encrypted and incomplete. Even if a former contact keeps it forever, they can't use it. It's 25% of your recovery — useless without other pieces.
• You can always add more Contacts. There's no limit on how many Recovery Contacts you can have. If you no longer trust a Contact, simply add new ones you do trust, and rely on those for your recovery paths going forward.

Practical takeaway: Choose your Recovery Contacts carefully at setup, because the relationship is durable. But know that even a worst-case scenario (an ex-friend who keeps your encrypted piece out of spite) gives them no power over your wallet.