---
# System prepended metadata

title: Copernicus key management

---

# Copernicus key management

This is about the main private key of the Copernicus DAO residing on the Ethereum blockchain.

## History
The inception of the key has been done by Hans Geldof. It's a 1-of-1 private key of an Ethereum address (type?)

In the meanwhile all the token sales have been received on the associated public key.

## Problem definition
1. If something happens to Hans, the value will be lost.
2. This is not really a decentralized situation to put it mildly.

## Solutions
It is always a balance between the problem you want to solve and not introducing additional complexity / new problems.


Therefore the direction of the solution is:
- to avoid the rotation of private keys, because in our situation (a Ledger) this means the transfer of assets.
- to avoid giving access to the 1-of-1 private key (as in 'accepting more than one controler of the priv key ), because then we wouldn't know who signs off transactions or creates other signatures.

### Recovery
Options
- Dead man switch (e.g. Dashlane, password manager)
- Sharding of private key

### Signing
- With the platform ({A wallet service on Metamask, which one was it again?}) we can import the key and add subkeys?
- A 2-of-3 or 3-of-5 signing scheme for operational purposes, apart from the existing 1-of-1 for controler Hans Geldof. We keep this 1-of-1 key in operation.
