What Is Automatic Asset Extraction (AAE)?

Automatic Asset Extraction (AAE) is a keyless recovery method for institutional digital assets. It uses pre-signed, continuously updated transactions to sweep assets to pre-approved vaults when wallets are compromised or inaccessible, without requiring access to private keys.

AAE is Circuit Security's proprietary recovery technology. It sits alongside a custody stack rather than replacing it, and it never holds or reconstructs private keys.

How Automatic Asset Extraction works

1. An institution defines its recovery destinations in advance: pre-approved vault addresses that assets can be swept to.
2. Circuit maintains pre-signed transactions that move assets from monitored wallets to those vaults. These transactions are continuously updated as balances, nonces, and network conditions change, so a valid recovery path always exists.
3. When a defined trigger occurs, a wallet is compromised, keys are lost, a signer is unavailable, or infrastructure fails, the relevant transaction is broadcast to the network.
4. Assets settle to the pre-approved vault. No private key access, seed phrase, or manual signing is needed at the moment of recovery.

Why it matters

Most institutional security spending goes to prevention: custody, key management, and access control. Prevention protects the ability to sign transactions. It does nothing once keys are lost, an operator is locked out, or an attacker already controls the wallet. That is the Respond and Recover gap in the NIST CSF 2.0 framework, and it is where assets are actually lost. AAE closes that gap by making recovery a pre-positioned capability rather than a post-incident scramble.

What AAE is not

Circuit is not a custodian and never holds private keys. AAE does not recover funds after they have already been stolen and moved by an attacker; it moves assets to safety using recovery paths that are established before any incident.

Frequently asked questions

Does Automatic Asset Extraction require private keys?‍

No. AAE recovers assets without access to private keys or seed phrases. Recovery paths are pre-signed and pre-approved before any incident, so no key material is needed at the time of recovery.

Is AAE a custody solution?‍

No. Circuit is not a custodian and never holds private keys. AAE is a recovery layer that operates alongside an institution's existing custody and key management stack.

When is Automatic Asset Extraction triggered?‍

AAE is triggered by defined events such as wallet compromise, key loss, signer unavailability, or infrastructure failure. On trigger, a pre-signed transaction sweeps assets to a pre-approved vault.

Can AAE recover funds already stolen in a hack?‍

AAE is a pre-positioned recovery capability, not post-hoc fund tracing. It moves assets to safety using recovery paths set up in advance, which is why it must be in place before an incident occurs.

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