Answers — without the crypto jargon.

A password vault that splits your secrets into encrypted fragments, scatters them across a decentralized network of independent operators, and records only a map of where they live on Solana — so no single party can read, lose, or hold your data for ransom.

Those services are excellent at what they do. They also require you to trust a single company with your encrypted vault. ShardKeep removes that trust: we architected the system so that nobody — not operators, not the protocol authors, not an attacker with full server access — can reassemble your vault without your wallet signature.

In practical terms: if ShardKeep disappeared tomorrow, your vault would still be recoverable by any client that can read the Solana cNFT and contact the Bastions directly.

Yes. The Pawn tier is free forever — 5 Quick Store + 20 Vault passwords, 3-of-5 Shamir, full browser extension. Write fees are covered by point task rewards you earn on the CARES platform and redeem for ShardKeep fees. You earn by doing work, not by signing up.

Paid tiers (Knight / Bishop / Rook / Queen) unlock stronger Shamir thresholds, automatic shard rotation, household sharing, and the flagship feature: Backup Wallet 2FA. Knight is $1.50/mo SHRD — and it's earnable for free via point task rewards. See the subscription tiers.

Yes — a Solana-compatible wallet is how you authenticate. We don't use passwords for accounts because we don't want to store password hashes. Your wallet signs a short challenge to unlock the vault. Any Solana wallet works: Phantom, Solflare, Backpack, hardware wallets, etc.

It's the first wallet-based second factor ever shipped in a password manager. Every other vault relies on SMS, email OTP, an authenticator app, or a recovery code they generate — all of which run through servers or phones that can be compromised.

ShardKeep's 2FA is a second Solana wallet on a different device with its own seed phrase. Registration requires both wallets to sign. Either wallet can trigger Emergency Lockdown on the vault — your backup becomes a cryptographic kill-switch. No OTP server. No SIM-swap risk. No authenticator app to lose. Available on Knight tier and above ($1.50/mo SHRD — earnable for free via point task rewards).

No. Every operator sees only encrypted blobs. The encryption keys never leave your device. Even if we wanted to read your vault, we would need to:

1. Collect at least K of N fragments (each held by a different Bastion),
2. Somehow obtain your wallet's signing key,
3. Break AES-256-GCM.

The cryptography prevents this — not our policy.

An attacker walks away with a catalog of ciphertext blobs whose content, ownership, and purpose are indistinguishable. They cannot decrypt anything without compromising both your wallet and K independent Bastion operators in different jurisdictions.

The default configuration is 3-of-5 — meaning up to 2 Bastions can go offline and your vault still opens. If a Bastion's downtime exceeds the SLA, the protocol redistributes its shards to other Bastions automatically.

Your wallet is the authority. Lose it with no backup and your vault is unrecoverable by anyone, including us. Back up your seed phrase with the same rigor you'd use for any wallet holding meaningful value. We strongly recommend hardware wallets.

Not yet. A full external audit is a hard prerequisite for MainNet — we won't launch without one. DevNet is for operator onboarding and protocol validation, not for storing real production secrets. See the roadmap.

Bastion rewards are capped at 20,000 SHRD per epoch (14 days) per node, with a floor of 2,000 SHRD per epoch. Your exact share each epoch is computed as challenge pass rate × uptime factor, clamped to that range. Score below 0.50 and the epoch pays zero. See operators page for the full formula.

Not for DevNet. New operators start with DevNet-SHRD (airdropped after a short Discord conversation with an admin) to bond their node. MainNet bonding will require real SHRD, acquired via DEX or earned through the CARES points program.

Short downtime (within your tier's uptime SLA — 99.5% Warden, 99% Bastion, best-effort Sentry) is normal and has no penalty. Extended unannounced downtime (>72h) slashes 25% of your bond. You can always gracefully exit with advance notice — 28 days for Warden, 14 days for Bastion, 48 hours for Sentry. Shards get redistributed during the notice window; pass audit and your bond is returned in full.

Yes, provided you satisfy the bond and uptime requirements for each. Many founding operators will run a Warden and several Sentries, for example. Each node requires its own bond.

Three reasons: compressed NFTs make per-user shard maps economically viable (cNFTs cost fractions of a cent to mint); wallet-based auth is widely supported; throughput is high enough for production-grade vaulting. The protocol is designed to be chain-portable — future versions may support additional substrates.

Shamir's Secret Sharing for fragment generation. PBKDF2-SHA256 with 100,000 iterations stretches wallet-signature key material into AES keys. AES-256-GCM for authenticated fragment encryption (12-byte IV, 256-bit key). WebCrypto (crypto.subtle) for every client-side primitive. Wallet-signed challenges (Ed25519 via Solana) for auth. No custom cryptography — everything is standard, battle-tested, and audit-friendly.

The protocol specification and client code will be fully open source at MainNet launch. Reference Bastion implementation is being finalized and will be published alongside the audit report.

Reading from a cached vault: yes. Adding new passwords or rotating existing ones requires the Bastion network to be reachable. The extension caches decrypted vault contents in memory (never to disk) while a session is active.