Passkeys & your account
ZeroSignal has no accounts in the usual sense. There is no email, password, or phone number — your passkey is your account.
Passkeys
When you get started, your device creates a passkey, unlocked by your face, fingerprint, or device PIN. Nothing is registered with us: no email, no password, no phone number, no personal details.
How ZeroSignal's passkeys are different
A passkey normally does just one job: it proves it's you. When you sign in, your device signs a one-time challenge with a private key that never leaves it, and the site you're signing into learns nothing beyond "the signature checks out." That's plenty to log in — but it hands the app no secret to build on, so an ordinary passkey can't, by itself, stand in for a wallet.
ZeroSignal's passkeys take on that second job using the WebAuthn PRF extension (PRF = pseudo-random function). PRF lets the app ask your passkey to compute a secret: give it the same input and it returns the same long, unguessable value every time, calculated inside your passkey manager and never sent to us. ZeroSignal uses that value as the seed your wallet keys are derived from — the same keys a recovery phrase encodes.
Because the seed is reproducible and tied to the passkey, everything else follows:
- One passkey, both jobs. It signs you in and regenerates your exact wallet, locally, every time — so no seed ever sits on a server to be stolen, and there's nothing for us to store or leak.
- Your account rides with the passkey. Any device your manager syncs the passkey to re-derives the same wallet and balance — nothing to export or re-link.
- Not every manager can do it. PRF is a newer part of the WebAuthn standard; a manager that doesn't implement it can still log you in elsewhere, but here it couldn't produce your seed. That's why only the managers below are supported.
The keys are your wallet
Those keys control a wallet that only you control. It holds your balance and pays per message. Because the wallet is yours, your funds are too: you can withdraw them at any time. See Funding for how money moves in and out.
Where passkeys live
Passkeys are stored and synced by your passkey manager — for example iCloud Keychain, Google Password Manager, or 1Password. If your manager syncs passkeys across your devices, your ZeroSignal account comes with them.
Supported passkey managers
ZeroSignal only works with passkey managers that implement PRF. These are validated:
| Manager | Availability |
|---|---|
| 1Password | Works everywhere. |
| iCloud Keychain | On iOS 18 / macOS 15 (Safari 18) and later. |
| Google Password Manager | On Android and Chrome. |
| Windows Hello | Windows. |
If you try to create a passkey in a manager without PRF support, the app will tell you and suggest one of the above.
If you lose access to your passkey (for example, you lose the only device it was on), the passkey can't be reissued — that's what makes it secure. Save your recovery phrase so you can restore your account and funds on a new passkey. See Recovery.
Why no email?
An email address, a phone number, a card on file — each one is a record of you that has to be collected, stored, and protected. A passkey requires none of these, preserving your privacy.