Graceful Degradation

The protocol degrades hierarchically — the closer to Bitcoin you lose, the harder the recovery.

Losing the L2 Contract (Graceful)

If Citrea goes down or the user wants to switch L2:

  1. Inscription data is permanent and readable on Bitcoin forever
  2. Membership Runes continue to function on Bitcoin L1
  3. Admin deploys a new contract on another L2
  4. New contract references the same inscription ID and rune ID
  5. Institution continues with full identity and membership intact

Losing the Inscription UTXO (Serious)

If the admin accidentally spends the inscription UTXO despite vault protection:

  1. Inscription data is permanent and readable forever
  2. L2 contracts continue to function short-term
  3. Admin re-inscribes a recovery record (child of original)
  4. L2 contracts are updated to reference the new inscription
  5. Original provenance chain is preserved

The vault script exists specifically to make this scenario extremely unlikely.

Losing the Bitcoin Key (Catastrophic)

  1. Committee (Leaf 1, 2-of-3 multisig) recovers the inscription to a new key's vault
  2. Admin deploys new L2 contracts from the new key
  3. This is the hardest recovery — the committee backstop is the last resort

The Hierarchy

L2 contract lost     → redeploy elsewhere, identity survives on Bitcoin
Inscription UTXO lost → re-inscribe + update L2 (harder, but recoverable)
Bitcoin key lost      → committee recovery (hardest, requires multi-sig)