Graceful Degradation

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

Losing the L2 (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 creates new process instances on another L2
  4. New instances reference the same inscription ID via templateInscriptionId
  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 process instances continue to function short-term
  3. Admin re-inscribes a recovery record (child of original)
  4. New L2 instances reference the new inscription ID
  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 creates new L2 process instances from the new key
  3. This is the hardest recovery — the committee backstop is the last resort

The Hierarchy

L2 down              → create instances elsewhere, identity survives on Bitcoin
Inscription UTXO lost → re-inscribe + new L2 instances (harder, but recoverable)
Bitcoin key lost      → committee recovery (hardest, requires multi-sig)