A seed alone is not an operator-outage recovery backup for Spark

What the evidence shows

Technical and product details

1. State requirement

   Blink states that current leaves cannot be discovered from the seed alone after Spark Operators are offline. 1

   Supporting material shown on this page

   Blink recovery-bundle requirementPinned source code · github.com · checked 2026-07-14

   22leaves cannot be discovered from the seed alone. The exit needs a **recovery
   23bundle** — a JSON snapshot of the wallet's leaves and their ancestor
   24transactions — refreshed while operators are still online:
   25
   26```sh
   27make refresh-recovery-bundle SEED_FILE=../.spark-seed.txt BUNDLE=../recovery-bundle.json
   28```

2. State representation

   Blink's procedure stores the required current leaves and ancestor transactions in a recovery bundle. Another implementation could persist equivalent complete state in a different format. 1

   Supporting material shown on this page

   Blink recovery-bundle requirementPinned source code · github.com · checked 2026-07-14

   22leaves cannot be discovered from the seed alone. The exit needs a **recovery
   23bundle** — a JSON snapshot of the wallet's leaves and their ancestor
   24transactions — refreshed while operators are still online:
   25
   26```sh
   27make refresh-recovery-bundle SEED_FILE=../.spark-seed.txt BUNDLE=../recovery-bundle.json
   28```

3. Online preparation

   The required state must be refreshed and validated while Operators remain reachable; the seed does not encode later changes to the wallet's Spark tree. 1

   Supporting material shown on this page

   Blink recovery-bundle requirementPinned source code · github.com · checked 2026-07-14

   22leaves cannot be discovered from the seed alone. The exit needs a **recovery
   23bundle** — a JSON snapshot of the wallet's leaves and their ancestor
   24transactions — refreshed while operators are still online:
   25
   26```sh
   27make refresh-recovery-bundle SEED_FILE=../.spark-seed.txt BUNDLE=../recovery-bundle.json
   28```

4. Outage consequence

   If current, complete exit state was not saved in advance, the documented offline procedure has no graph from which to construct the exit. 1

   Supporting material shown on this page

   Blink recovery-bundle requirementPinned source code · github.com · checked 2026-07-14

   22leaves cannot be discovered from the seed alone. The exit needs a **recovery
   23bundle** — a JSON snapshot of the wallet's leaves and their ancestor
   24transactions — refreshed while operators are still online:
   25
   26```sh
   27make refresh-recovery-bundle SEED_FILE=../.spark-seed.txt BUNDLE=../recovery-bundle.json
   28```

Scope control

What this does not establish

• The seed still derives the signing keys, fee-funding address, and final sweep. Complete current leaf-and-ancestor state need not use Blink's JSON format, but it must exist before an all-Operator outage. With that state and fee funds, the documented exit proceeds without later Operator cooperation. 12

Sources and excerpts

Primary sources

The relevant details and available source-code excerpts appear alongside the claims above. This list preserves the complete original-source trail for independent verification.