Developer Guide

Export Private Keys

End users of your platform can unilaterally export and take full ownership of the private keys of their wallets.

To enable a user to export their private keys, your platform must implement the following flow:

  1. From your BE, call Fordefi’s API set end user export permissions to allow=true. Note that this request should be called separately for every end-user who requires private key extraction.
  2. From your app that embeds our SDK, call the exportKeys function to return a JSON file containing all user’s private keys.

The following diagram illustrates this flow:

Considerations for further handling

  1. In the returned JSON file, Fordefi provides both ECDSA and EdDSA keys:
    • An ECDSA key should be used to recover assets on all the EVM chains, Bitcoin, and Cosmos. This private key can be imported to third-party wallets such as Metamask, Electrum wallet or Keplr, accordingly, to allow fast and seamless asset recovery.
    • An EdDSA key should be used to recover assets on Solana, Aptos, and Sui. There is no straightforward way to recover assets on chains that use EdDSA keys, so the user-facing application should implement on chain transaction to enable the end users to access their assets.
  2. Once the private key is exported, the user can use it unilaterally outside of the platform, which may lead to an unknown outgoing transaction from the wallet.