May 9: The developers Ripple and XRPL Labs have joined Algorand Foundation and Hedera developer Swirlds Labs as founding members of the DeRec Alliance. The alliance supports the Decentralized Recovery (DeRec) open-source protocol. According to a press release, this protocol maps out "a standard approach to secret management, based on secret sharing among a set of helpers (e.g. friends or businesses), who can assist the user to recover their secret when needed. Each helper's share reveals no information about the original secret, and half the helpers can give the user their shares to reconstruct the secret, even when a user has lost their phone or other two-factor recovery device. The protocol includes automatic regular confirmations that helpers still have shares of secrets, and automatic re-sharing when secrets change or helpers join or leave. The user never reveals who the helpers are, nor even how many helpers there are, and even the helpers won’t know that."
