Vault12

• Name: Vault12
• URL: https://vault12.com/
• Category: key-backup and inheritance tooling / guardian-based recovery control plane
• Summary: Vault12 is key-survivability plumbing, not a wallet or custodian. The useful part is the guardian-based recovery model: encrypted secret backup across trusted people and devices, 2-of-3 recovery as the default operating shape, and beneficiary-oriented inheritance workflow. Keep it as a recovery note, not as a broad custody platform.
• What it does:
  • Lets users store seed phrases, private keys, wallet backups, and other sensitive digital assets inside a non-custodial “Digital Vault” managed from a mobile app
  • Uses trusted Guardians — people and/or spare devices — to help recover the Vault or unlock stored assets after phone loss or other incidents
  • Offers a digital-inheritance workflow where the owner designates a beneficiary or legacy contact for future access to the portfolio of stored secrets
  • Supports threshold-style recovery flows, with 2-of-3 guardian confirmations presented as the default recommended setup
  • Publishes open-source infrastructure and tooling around its Zax cryptographic relay, client libraries, whitepapers, and recovery utilities through its GitHub organization
• Key claims:
  • The homepage and product pages repeatedly say Vault12 is not a financial institution, exchange, wallet provider, or custodian, and does not hold or control user funds
  • The inheritance page says Vault12 Guard enables owners to assign a legacy contact who can gain access to the portfolio of seed phrases and private keys in the user’s Digital Vault when the time comes
  • The help overview says Vault12 encrypts, splits, and distributes assets across a mesh of trusted mobile devices rather than relying on centralized cloud or purely local storage
  • The setup guide recommends 3 total Guardians with 2 confirmations required for recovery, and explicitly suggests a mix of trusted people and spare devices under the owner’s control
  • The unlock guide says Guardians only confirm the owner’s identity request and do not see which specific asset is being accessed
  • The help center says the ZAX Relay Network is open source on GitHub, and the GitHub organization exposes relay, client-library, recovery-utility, and whitepaper repositories
  • The GitHub whitepapers repository says Vault12’s cryptostorage platform is based on hierarchical Shamir’s secret sharing and links to both a technical whitepaper and a separate NaCl-based relay specification
• Whitepaper: Official technical whitepaper and relay-spec PDFs are surfaced from Vault12’s own GitHub whitepapers repository and were saved locally as ../whitepapers/vault12-technical-whitepaper.pdf and ../whitepapers/vault12-zax-relay-spec.pdf; see also ../whitepapers/vault12-primary-sources-2026-05-06.md.
• Sources:
  • https://vault12.com/
  • https://vault12.com/product/inheritance/
  • https://vault12.com/help/
  • https://vault12.com/help/digital-vault-setup/
  • https://vault12.com/help/recovery-phrase-vault12/
  • https://vault12.com/help/restore-digital-vault12/
  • https://github.com/vault12
  • https://github.com/vault12/whitepapers

Internal linkages

• Best upward comparison points: casa, bitkey, and unchained.

Governance / control risk

• The leverage is in guardian selection, threshold defaults, restore choreography, and relay availability.

• This is recovery infrastructure. Do not read it as a wallet or custodian just because the app is where the secrets sit.

• Last reviewed: 2026-05-28 UTC