Is my money safe?

It's the first question everyone asks, and the right one to ask. The short answer is that your money lives in your own wallet, on a public network, controlled by keys that only you hold. MozaikPay never holds your funds or your keys. This page explains what that actually means, where the real protections are, and what's left for you to look after.

Your money lives in your wallet, not with us

When you keep money at a bank or a crypto exchange, you hold a promise. They hold the money, and you trust them to give it back when you ask. Most of the time that works fine, but if they freeze your account, get hacked, or go under, your money is caught up in it.

MozaikPay works differently. It's a self-custodial wallet: you, and only you, control your funds. Your digital dollars aren't a number in our database. They sit in a wallet that belongs to you on Base, a public network that no single company runs, and moving them requires a key that only exists on your phone. Our servers can't spend your money, because they don't have anything to spend it with.

That leads to a useful thought experiment. If MozaikPay shut down tomorrow, servers off, app pulled from the store, team unreachable, your money would still be sitting in your wallet on that public network, still yours, still movable with your keys. We built it that way on purpose. An app you trust with your savings shouldn't require you to trust the app.

Two keys, two jobs

Your wallet is controlled by two separate keys, and each one can do only its own job.

Your spending key is created on your phone and stored in your phone's secure storage. It never leaves the device, not even to us. It's the only key that can move money, and it only signs a payment after you've confirmed it on screen with your PIN or biometrics. Every single money move works this way. There's no path where our servers, or anyone else, sign a payment for you.

Your recovery key is the spare. It gets your wallet back on a new device, and that's its whole job. You back it up as a file encrypted with a recovery password that only you know. The password is never sent anywhere, so even when a backup travels through your cloud or your inbox, what travels is a locked box that only you can open.

The point of the split is that the key you use every day is not the key whose loss is fatal. A stolen phone doesn't give the thief your money, and a lost phone doesn't lose it either. What happens if I lose my phone? walks through that story, and The two-key model goes deeper into how the two keys work.

What MozaikPay can and cannot do

Self-custody is easy to claim and harder to mean, so here's the honest version.

We cannot move or spend your money. We cannot change your keys. We cannot freeze your wallet or take it over, because the wallet itself has no admin switch, no override, nothing reserved for us. We can't even reset your PIN. Resetting it requires your recovery backup and its password, which only you have.

What we do run is everything around the wallet. The app, the servers that prepare your transactions, the network fees we pay so you never have to, and the partner connections for moving money in and out. In rare cases, for example when the law requires it, we can pause those services for an account. Even then the money stays in the wallet and stays yours. We think that's the right trade-off, and it's the one we chose deliberately. The details, including the fine print, are in Self-custody.

Money on the move

When you send money to another MozaikPay user, it moves straight from your wallet to theirs, almost instant and free. It never sits in an account of ours along the way, because we don't have one.

A payment link is a little different, because the money has to wait for someone. While it waits, it sits in a vault on the network that can do exactly two things, pay the person who has the link, or send the money back to you. Nobody else can touch it, us included, and if a link expires unclaimed, the money comes back to your wallet automatically.

Adding money and cashing out run through licensed local partners, built right into the app. While a deposit is on its way, the partner briefly holds it, the same way any payment processor does, and then delivers digital dollars straight to your wallet.

What about the dollars themselves?

Being safe from theft is one half of the question. The other half is whether a digital dollar stays worth a dollar. That story, what digital dollars are, who issues USDC, and what stands behind it, has its own page in What are digital dollars?

The part that's yours to protect

Nobody can take your money without your keys. The flip side is that nobody can undo your mistakes, not even us. If you lose your recovery backup or forget its password, and then lose your phone, there's no support ticket that gets your wallet back.

So in practice, your money's safety rests on a short list. Keep your PIN to yourself, know where your recovery backup lives, and remember its password. If you ever suspect one of them has been exposed, you can change your PIN or change your recovery key anytime.