What happens when I enabled Cloud Recovery?

What happens if I lose my phone?

Your Bitcoin is safe. Cloud Recovery means your seed phrase is stored, encrypted, in your own iCloud or Google Drive, and the key to unlock it is held separately by Blockrise. Get a new phone, log in to Blockrise, connect the same cloud account, and your wallet is restored in seconds.

What happens if I cannot log in to Blockrise?

Blockrise no longer uses passwords. You log in with a one time code sent to your registered email address, combined with two factor authentication. If you cannot receive the email code, recover access to your email inbox first, then request a new login code. Losing access to the login flow on its own does not put your Bitcoin at risk: recovery still requires two factor authentication.

What happens if I lose access to my iCloud or Google account?

Recover your iCloud or Google account first, through Apple or Google. Once that is back, your Blockrise wallet is back too.

If recovering the cloud account is not possible, two fallbacks exist. Clients who used Advanced Setup at onboarding still have their 24-word seed phrase and can restore manually. Clients who used Quick Setup, where the seed phrase is never displayed, can use the Blockrise Back-up service. The Back-up service is a separate recovery key held by Stichting Blockrise, an independent foundation. There is a fee of €999 to use it.

What happens if I never set up Cloud Recovery?

You keep using the traditional 24-word seed phrase. Write it down, store it somewhere safe, and treat it like the only thing standing between you and your Bitcoin, because it is. Both routes are supported, and neither is wrong.

Note: even if someone else obtains your 24 words, they still cannot move your Bitcoin. The 24 words are one layer in a multi step setup, not a single point of failure. Losing the seed phrase, however, does mean recovery is only possible via the Cloud Recovery flow or the Back-up service.

What happens if iCloud, Google Drive, or Blockrise gets hacked?

Nothing useful for an attacker.

If iCloud or Google Drive is compromised, the file an attacker would find is encrypted noise. They would still need the key from Blockrise to do anything with it. If Blockrise's infrastructure is compromised, the file an attacker would find is the encrypted key, useless without the cloud backup sitting in your personal account. There is no single point of failure. Both pieces are needed, and only you hold both.

What happens if Blockrise goes out of business?

If Blockrise Capital B.V. were to stop operating, the systems you need to access your wallet (the client dashboard software and the HSM infrastructure) are controlled by Stichting Blockrise, an independent foundation. Under MiCAR, Stichting Blockrise is required to remain operational for a defined period after a wind down, specifically so that clients can offboard their assets. The encryption key needed to make your Cloud Recovery backup readable is also held by Stichting Blockrise, separate from Blockrise as a company.

What happens if I leave Blockrise?

When you close your Blockrise account, your KYC information and transaction records are kept by Blockrise Capital B.V. for the period required by the Dutch Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Act (Wwft) and MiCAR. This is 5 years from the end of the customer relationship, and may be extended where ongoing legal, tax, or regulatory obligations apply. Blockrise cannot delete this data earlier, even on request. After the retention period ends, the data is deleted from Blockrise's systems.

Under Article 17 of the GDPR you have the right to ask for your personal data to be erased. Article 17(3)(b) recognises that this right does not apply where Blockrise is required to retain the data under EU or Dutch law, including the Wwft.

Your encrypted backup file in iCloud or Google Drive belongs to you and remains in your own cloud account. You can delete it yourself at any time. The encryption key held by Blockrise to make the backup readable is removed in line with our offboarding procedure (Engineering and Compliance to confirm exact timing).

Can Blockrise access my Bitcoin?

No. The seed phrase is encrypted on your device with a randomly generated key. The encrypted seed phrase lives in your iCloud or Google Drive. The decryption key lives with Stichting Blockrise, wrapped in a second layer of encryption (envelope encryption with Google Cloud KMS) that no Blockrise employee can open on their own.

To access your Bitcoin, someone would need both the encrypted backup from your personal cloud account and the decryption key from Stichting Blockrise at the same time.

Contact support@blockrise.com, and the Blockrise team will guide you through the process.