My role wasn’t to invent the cryptography. It was to make the experience safe, predictable, and boring in the best possible way.
When Gnosis rebranded to a new domain, passkeys couldn’t be carried over. They’re cryptographically bound to the domain where they were created. Losing access wasn’t an option.
Engineering handled the hard parts: related-origin permissions, cross-domain constraints, fallback transactions. My job was to turn weeks of edge-case handling into a single, comprehensible action for users.
The result: create a new passkey on the new domain, confirm, done. A 10-second interaction that hides a lot of complexity. Intentionally.
In parallel, we designed a new recovery model for everyday users. Existing crypto patterns like social guardians, MPC, or ZK-based recovery were powerful but far too technical for our audience.
Together with engineering and growth, we explored multiple approaches before aligning on a guardian-based recovery with a time delay and cancellation window. From the user’s perspective, it feels like a familiar email-based recovery flow. Under the hood, it safely updates smart-contract ownership without ever exposing private keys.
Both flows follow the same principle:
hide the machinery, surface only certainty.
If users don’t feel the complexity, the design did its job.
