BRC-100 defines wallet/application operations but not universal storage interchange among all implementations.
Specific export and storage behavior must be checked in each implementation.PortabilitySourced answer
Can users actually leave a wallet, app, or overlay?
“User-owned data is marketing if the user cannot export it, move wallets, replace a service, or keep using it when a provider disappears.”
Answer with conditions · Updated 2026-10-05 · Next review 2026-11-05
By BSV.place / Project Babbage. Editorial review; source access dates below. No independent product retest is implied.
Short answer
The short answer
A user may control signing keys while still depending on one wallet database, hosted overlay, certificate issuer, lookup service, or application schema. BRC-100 and the overlay stack define useful interfaces, but each product must prove what is exportable, intelligible, restorable, and replaceable. The honest output is a layer-by-layer exit matrix and a tested migration.
Mechanism and practical meaning
Preserve the materials that make authority usable
Signing authority is one layer. Recovery may also require derivation or wallet records, transaction history, certificates, schemas, private state, media, indexes and access instructions. A seed alone is not a promise that every implementation can reconstruct these materials.
A retained proof helps verify a particular record. It does not establish that a lookup service returned all relevant records, that its view is fresh, or that a previously included output remains unspent. Define the recovery packet, then perform a scoped restore with the original dependency unavailable before calling it tested.
What is true
The objection's strongest ground
- BRC-100 defines an application/wallet interface, not a universal guarantee that every wallet store is mutually importable.
- Overlay services can distribute application-specific state and discovery while leaving schema, hosting, and index dependencies.
- On-chain records can remain publicly retrievable while application meaning or decryption depends on other data and keys.
What remains unresolved
Do not claim more than the evidence
- This site has not independently validated a full migration across every wallet and service represented in the ecosystem.
- Portability within BSV does not equal portability to another settlement rail.
Inspect it yourself
What to inspect next
- Export keys, transaction history, baskets, labels, certificates, application records, and service configuration in documented formats.
- Restore into a clean environment or alternate implementation and reproduce a prior user action.
- Disable the original hosted dependency and observe which capabilities survive.
Open to better evidence
What would change this answer?
Routine, independently reproduced migrations would strengthen user-ownership claims. Proprietary stores, unavailable exports, or irreplaceable hosts would weaken them.
Evidence behind the answer
What the cited sources establish
The current stack exposes wallet and overlay implementations that can be inspected for dependency boundaries.
Source desk
Read the underlying material
PrimaryBRC-100 — Unified wallet-to-application interfaceThe current unified interface covering wallet actions, signatures, encryption, certificates, permissions, and discovery.BRC contributors · Source access 2026-10-05CodeBSV TypeScript stackCurrent monorepo for SDK, wallet, overlay, messaging, middleware, helpers, infrastructure, documentation, and conformance vectors.BSV Association contributors · Source access 2026-10-05CodeBSV TypeScript conformance corpusLanguage-neutral vectors and runners. Inspect current coverage and parity before calling the whole interface interoperable.BSV Association contributors · Source access 2026-10-05