Deleting a wallet and wiping a vault are not the same thing. Thanos Wallet’s reset function removes the local encrypted data rather than moving it somewhere else — which is what a reset is supposed to mean for a self-custody wallet.
Most users who reset a wallet app expect a clean outcome: the wallet is gone, the data is gone, and the device no longer holds anything connected to that wallet. What they often get instead is a soft delete — the app is removed from the screen, but the underlying data remains in a backup tied to a cloud account, accessible to anyone who knows the associated account credentials or triggers a device restore. The wallet was deleted in the sense that the icon disappeared. The vault contents were not.
This gap between apparent deletion and actual data removal matters in several scenarios that are more common than they might seem. A device is sold or given away without a full factory reset. A cloud backup is compromised. A device is recovered from a factory reset using a cloud backup that pre-dated the wallet deletion. In each case, a user who believed they had cleanly removed their wallet from a device discovers that the vault data persisted through the process they thought had ended it.
Thanos Wallet’s reset function is designed to mean what users expect it to mean. When the vault is reset, the locally stored encrypted data is removed from the device. There is no archive copy, no cloud backup retention, no recovery path that goes through Thanos Wallet’s infrastructure — because Thanos Wallet does not route key material through external infrastructure in the first place. The mnemonic and the keys derived from it live on the device, in the AES-encrypted local vault, and the reset removes that vault. After a reset, the device does not retain a recoverable copy of the wallet data.
The flip side of this is important to understand clearly. A vault reset in Thanos Wallet is irreversible from the device side — because there is no server copy to restore from. The only recovery path after a reset is the 12-word BIP39 recovery phrase the user wrote down when they set up the wallet. If that phrase exists and is intact, the wallet can be fully restored in any BIP-compatible wallet, including Thanos Wallet itself. If the phrase was lost before the reset, the assets are inaccessible. This is not a flaw in the design — it is the correct behavior for a self-custody wallet. The user holds the phrase. The user controls access. No third party can restore a vault the user intentionally wiped, which is the same property that prevents a third party from accessing it without the user’s consent.
The vault reset behavior also matters in the context of device transfers. A user who sells or gives away a device and resets Thanos Wallet before doing so can be confident that the new device owner does not inherit wallet access through leftover local data or a restoration path the previous owner was unaware of. The reset does what it says. The subsequent owner of the device cannot use a device backup to recover wallet data that has been wiped, because the vault removal happens at the local storage level, not merely at the app level.
Self-custody means the user is in full control of their keys — including the control to permanently and cleanly end access from a specific device when they choose to. A reset function that leaves recoverable data behind does not fully deliver that control. Thanos Wallet’s reset is built so that when a user decides their wallet on a given device is done, it is actually done — not pending a cloud retention policy or a backup window that may still contain what they thought they removed.
