How vaults recover

Which vaults need the Recovery Kit and which are rebuilt from the chain alone

A vault is a multisig. Its address is not a key, so restoring your recovery phrase does not restore the vault. The phrase gives you one key out of several, and something else has to tell a tool what the vault is.

Where that “something else” lives differs by chain, and it decides your whole recovery procedure.

The two families

Config on the chain

EVM, Solana, Tron, XRP

The vault’s owners and threshold are stored on the blockchain itself. Any tool that reads the chain finds them. Import your key, open the right interface, and the vault is there.

The kit records which address to point that tool at, not material to rebuild from.

Config off the chain

Bitcoin, Cardano

The chain stores only a hash of the vault’s script. The script itself exists only in your Recovery Kit.

Without the kit these funds cannot be reached.

For Bitcoin and Cardano vaults, every owner’s recovery phrase together is still not enough. The script that turns those keys into the vault address is not recoverable from the keys. Download the Recovery Kit from the Trustodian app before you need it, and download it again after creating a vault, because it covers only the vaults that existed when it was generated.

What each chain uses

Chain	Mechanism	What recovers it
EVM	Gnosis Safe contract	Your owner key, plus any Safe interface pointed at the vault address
Solana	Squads program	Your owner key, plus a Squads interface pointed at the config account
Tron	Account permissions (owner and active, each with a threshold)	Your key, plus TronWeb — see Tron vaults
XRP	Signer list on the account; the account’s own master key is disabled	A quorum of signers, plus xrpl.js — see XRP vaults
Bitcoin	wsh(sortedmulti(...)) output descriptor	The descriptor from your Recovery Kit
Cardano	Native atLeast script	The script files from your Recovery Kit

On the four on-chain chains, the vault keeps working because the configuration is public and permanent. Your obligation is to keep your own key recoverable, which the recovery phrase already does, and to know the vault’s address — which the kit records for you.

Solana is the exception among the four. The address that holds the funds is derived from the Squads config account and cannot be turned back into it, so knowing only where the money sits is not enough to reopen the vault. The kit records the config account and marks it. See Solana.

When an owner joined with an imported wallet

An owner who brought their wallet into Trustodian by pasting a private key contributes a single fixed public key. It has no HD tree above it, so there is nothing for a wallet to range over.

A Bitcoin vault with such an owner cannot be imported into any external wallet — not Sparrow, not Specter, not Bitcoin Core. The descriptor has no /* to walk, and importers reject it.

It is not lost. Your Recovery Kit prints the script, the address, the threshold and every cosigner key, and the vault can be rebuilt and spent by hand with bitcoin-cli. But plan for that now rather than discovering it mid-recovery. See Vaults that cannot be imported at all.

Cardano is easier: such a vault still rebuilds normally, and only that one owner signs differently. See If an owner joined with an imported wallet.

The kit marks the affected vault on its own page, above everything else, so the limit is the first thing you read rather than the last.

Which cosigner key is yours

Your cosigner key is not your personal wallet key on that chain. On Bitcoin and Cardano it lives on a separate derivation path, which Derivation paths lists in full.

On the four on-chain chains, the key that owns your seat in the vault is the ordinary wallet key for that chain, at whichever index the wallet you joined with sits. Restore that wallet by following its network page, and your seat comes with it.

Where to go next

Bitcoin vaults

Descriptors, Sparrow, Specter and Bitcoin Core

Cardano vaults

Native scripts and cardano-cli

XRP vaults

Reading the signer list and multi-signing a payment

Tron vaults

Reading the permissions and co-signing a transfer

The Recovery Kit

What is in it and when to download it again