FIP-5: Instant Recovery

[varunsrin]

Title: Instant Recovery
Type: Implementation FIP
Authors: @v

Abstract

Fids should be recoverable without a delay to enable a better user experience for the recovery flow.

Problem

Fids have a time-delayed recovery system which protects against the loss of the custody address. The recovery system works like this:

• The custody address can nominate a recovery address at any time.
• The recovery address can request a transfer, which will move the fid from the custody address to a new address after a delay.
• For 3 days after the request, the custody address can cancel the request made by the recovery address.
• After 3 days, the recovery address can complete the transfer, will moves the fid from the custody address to the new address.

The delayed recovery allows users to choose semi-trusted partners for recovery such as a third-party service or a distant friend. If the service initiated a request without the user's approval, they could always cancel it.

In practice, users don't seem to care about the semi-trusted use case as much and tend to be more "barbell" in their strategies. They either want to use their own primary wallet because they trust no one else, or they want to delegate the entire problem of recovery to a third party without worrying about "semi-trusted" situations. In both cases, the delay adds unnecessary friction.

Specification

The recovery system should be simplified to allow the recovery address to transfer the fid without a waiting period. All other rules governing transfers should continue to apply.

Implementation

The following changes should be made to the IdRegistry contract:

• transfer is updated to allow being called by the recovery address.
• storage recoveryStateOf can be deprecated
• events RequestRecovery and CancelRecovery can be deprecated
• functions requestRecovery , completeRecovery and cancelRecovery can be deprecated

An implementation PR can be found here: farcasterxyz/contracts#226

Rationale

Why not have configurable delays?

Delays could be configurable allowing instant or delayed recoveries enabling both use cases. But this adds a lot of complexity and costs to the contract for marginal benefits. If users really want a very customized recovery setup, they would be better off using a smart contract wallet as their custody address instead.

Release

The changes will be released with the next major release of the contracts in preparation for the mainnet release.