This also explains why Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin seems so excited about one particular feature of HTC’s Exodus 1, called social key recovery. Essentially, users can choose a small group of contacts and give them parts of their keys. If they lose their keys, they can recover them piece by piece from their contacts. Buterin, as usual, is looking far down the road, in this case to a future where people use blockchains to maintain more control over their digital identities and personal data than is generally possible today. Social key recovery is “arguably an early step toward formalized non-state-backed identity,” he tweeted.