What is a TEE wallet? How is it different from a Web3 wallet?
Why Morph Payments creates a wallet for you automatically, and how account recovery works if you lose your email.
A TEE wallet is a wallet Morph Payments creates for you automatically when you sign up — no browser extension, seed phrase, or prior crypto experience required. Its private key is generated and sealed inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), a piece of secure hardware that even Morph Payments itself cannot read. You access it simply by logging in with your email, the way you would any normal account.
A traditional Web3 wallet instead puts the private key directly in your hands (or a seed phrase you must store yourself) — more control, but also more to manage and no way to recover access if it’s lost.
If you lose access to the email your TEE wallet is tied to, account recovery goes through Morph Payments’s identity-verification process to re-link your wallet to a new email — reach out to support to start it. This is why we also strongly recommend enabling 2FA up front.
What ‘Trusted Execution Environment’ actually means
A TEE is a secure enclave inside a processor chip — hardware-isolated from the operating system and everything else running on the same machine. Code executing inside a TEE cannot be read or tampered with, even by software running at the highest privilege level. Intel SGX and ARM TrustZone are the two most common implementations. When Morph Payments generates your wallet’s private key, it happens inside this enclave. The key never leaves it in plaintext, which means Morph Payments’s own servers cannot read it either.
Non-custodial, even though Morph Payments set it up
This is the part that matters most for your business. Because the private key is sealed in hardware that Morph Payments cannot access, Morph Payments cannot move your funds on your behalf — even if instructed to. Your TEE wallet is non-custodial: no party has custody of your balance. When money arrives in your wallet, it is yours, not Morph Payments’s. No approval needed to use it, no holding period, no one to ask.
The trade-off compared to a self-custody wallet
A self-custody wallet (MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Ledger) puts the seed phrase in your hands directly. Maximum independence — but if you lose the seed phrase, access is gone permanently and no one can recover it. A TEE wallet uses hardware to protect the key and ties access to your email identity, making account recovery possible via identity verification. Neither is strictly better; they’re different trade-offs between independence and recoverability.
What to do to keep your wallet safe
Enable 2FA immediately after signing up. Your TEE wallet is tied to your Morph Payments account — anyone who can log in as you can initiate actions from it. 2FA means a leaked password alone isn’t sufficient to get in. Also keep access to the email address your account is tied to: losing email access means going through Morph Payments’s identity-verification process, which takes time. A well-secured email and 2FA together make losing access very unlikely.
