Recover Your Bitcoin Without Keystody

Your vault is not a Keystody product. It is a standard Bitcoin 2-of-3 multisig described by an output descriptor — a line of text, defined by a public specification, that any modern Bitcoin wallet can read. It names your three extended public keys, the derivation paths, and the rule that any two of the three can spend.

Give that descriptor to a descriptor-aware wallet and it will find your addresses, see your balance, and let you spend with two of your three keys. We have tested this ourselves in Sparrow and Bitcoin Core; other wallets that support descriptors should work too, since the format is a public standard, but we have not verified each one and would rather tell you that than imply a compatibility list we have not earned. Keystody is not involved in any of those steps, and nothing about the descriptor depends on us continuing to exist.

That is the whole recovery story. Everything below is detail.

Three things. None of them lives only with us.

Your descriptor. Exported from Keystody during setup, printed on your Recovery Document, and — if you followed the setup — stored offline somewhere you can reach it. It contains public keys only. Someone who finds it can see your balance and your transaction history, which is a genuine privacy loss, but they cannot spend a satoshi with it. Keep it private; do not panic if it is not.

Two of your three keys. The hardware wallets themselves, or their seed phrases. This is the part only you have. We have never held any of them, and no production vault has ever had a key we controlled.

Descriptor-aware wallet software. Sparrow is the usual choice and the one we have tested most. Bitcoin Core also works — it is what we check our address derivation against on every build.

If you have those, you can recover. If you have lost two of three keys, no one can help you — not us, not anyone. That is what self-custody means, and it is the reason the setup process pushes so hard on distributing keys sensibly and keeping the descriptor somewhere safe.

Assume Keystody is gone — not down for an hour, gone.

1. Install Sparrow from sparrowwallet.com, and verify the download signature. This matters more than usual: you are about to handle keys, and a tampered wallet is the obvious attack on someone in a hurry.
2. Create a new wallet and import your descriptor. Sparrow reads it and reconstructs the vault — same script type, same key order, same addresses.
3. Check the addresses match what you remember from Keystody. If you kept a copy of your first receive address, compare it. This confirms you imported the right thing.
4. Let it scan. Sparrow will find your transaction history and balance from the Bitcoin network directly. Nothing is asked of us.
5. Spend when you need to by connecting two of your three devices and signing.

Steps 2 through 5 involve no Keystody service, no account, no subscription, and no permission from us.

Full recovery, on mainnet, with real Bitcoin. A mainnet recovery was completed on 11 July 2026: exported a vault, reconstructed it in third-party wallet software with Keystody closed, and broadcast a real transaction from the restored wallet. Not a testnet rehearsal — actual funds, actual network.

The exact software versions used were not recorded, and a current, versioned re-test is pending. We would rather say that than let a date stand in for evidence we cannot reproduce.

Address derivation, verified continuously. Every build we ship runs the vault descriptor through our own code and compares the resulting addresses against ones produced by Bitcoin Core, the reference implementation. If our derivation ever drifted from the standard — the failure that would make a third-party wallet find an empty vault — the build fails before it reaches you. The Security & Trust page publishes the test vault and the command, so you can run the check yourself.

The worst time to learn recovery is during an emergency. Do it now instead, calmly, on your own schedule — see Run a Recovery Drill for the full procedure.

The short version: import your descriptor into Sparrow as a watch-only wallet — no keys required, no risk to anything. Confirm the addresses match and the balance is right. That single exercise tells you your descriptor is good and your understanding is sound, which is most of what a recovery drill is for.

Keystody tracks this as part of your vault's Recovery Readiness, and reminds you if it has been more than a year. Not because we need to know — because you do.

We cannot recover a vault for you if you have lost two of three keys. We cannot reconstruct a descriptor from nothing if you have lost every copy, although we can help while we exist. We cannot reverse a transaction.

We hold no key in your vault, so there is nothing here to seize, freeze, or compel. That is the point of the design, and it cuts both ways: the same property that means we cannot be forced to move your Bitcoin also means we cannot move it back for you.

Questions about your own setup: support@keystody.com.