Your Vault in the Clouds

Picture having a physical wallet where you store tangible cash. You hold absolute control and responsibility for that money without any intermediary or bank involvement in your everyday transactions. Now, when you create your Sentz wallet, consider it your digital equivalent. Much like managing physical cash in your wallet, the Sentz wallet grants you total control over your private keys and transactions. It’s all yours – even Sentz’s servers cannot peek inside. 

Losing your wallet means losing access to your funds - which no one wants – so backing up and securing your wallet is an important step.

Behind the Scenes of your Wallet:

Within your wallet, there are two essential components:

1. Public Keys (Your “Wallet Address”): Think of these as your account number, used by others to send funds to your wallet. 
2. Private Keys: Consider these as your unique digital signature. In traditional banking, you authorize transactions through various means, like signatures on checks and PINs for debit cards. Similarly with Sentz, these keys act as a form of ownership proof and grant control over the funds associated with your private keys. 

Sentz streamlines your experience by linking your public keys to something familiar – like your phone number, email, or a unique handle – making transactions simple, easy, and user-friendly. 

The Importance of the “24 Words:” 

Your 24-word secret phrase, often referred to as the recovery phrase or seed phrase, is the key to full ownership of your funds and data in Sentz. It’s a string of words designed to recover your account if you forget your pin. 

Normally, you would need to write down your secret phrase onto a piece of physical paper and store it securely. Sounds pretty antiquated for a cutting edge industry, right? We thought so too, so we made it easy for you to backup your secret phrase directly onto your mobile device. 

Your Vault in the Clouds

A vault is designed to securely store your valuables. We’ve built a vault in the Clouds (iCloud and Google Cloud, that is) so that you can secure your valuable keys while having control over your funds with the ease of recovery you expect from mobile apps. 

How Sentz’s Cloud Backup Works

In plain terms:

• We use the Apple or Google account tied to your phone number to store a small recovery code in iCloud or Google Cloud, respectively. 
• During recovery of your account, Sentz combines information stored on Sentz’s servers with the information reviewed from your Apple or Google account. 

For those that love technical details:

• We use AES256-GCM with a securely generated random key to encrypt your 24 words locally on your device.
• The random use-once key is then stored in Apple/Google Cloud, and the encrypted 24 words are sent to Sentz’s servers.
• These two parts are useless on their own and are only ever combined on the user’s device during the recovery process.

Maximizing privacy and security is a core principle for us at Sentz. We designed Sentz Cloud backup to be “multi-party design” meaning, neither Sentz nor Apple or Google have sufficient data to recover your wallet keys or access your funds.

Incredible, right? 

Additional Ways to Backup Your Wallet

Prefer to handle backups yourself? No problem! You can opt out of Cloud Backup in Sentz. For those that use Cloud Backup, we still recommend storing your secret phrase in an additional place. Some friendly reminders are below:

• DO use a trusted password manager to store your wallet
• DO write your 24 words on a piece of paper and store them in a secure safe
• DON'T jot down your 24 words in insecure places like phone notes or sticky notes. 
• DON’T share your 24 words with anyone, even if they claim to be from Sentz. 

Questions? 

If you have any questions about Cloud Backup, 24 words, or account security please reach out to us at support@sentz.com.

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