foreign
[Music]
and I'm the founder and CEO of Empire
wallet and I'm going to tell you about
the future of ethereum wallets and
ethereum ux and two technologies are at
the core of this and that's a smart
contract wallets kind of also known as
account obstructions and MPC otherwise
known as smooth party computation and
sometimes referred to as threshold
signatures in this case the question is
can self custody be the future for the
next billion users how can we onboard
the next billion users and there is a
big myth in the space that most people
are not ready for self-custody but the
actual reality is that most
self-custodial wallets are not ready for
the users not the other way around
uh and uh I'm guessing uh can I get a
show of hands who saw the account
obstruction panel yesterday with uh
vitalik cool yeah
um so you all know that sit phrases are
absolutely terrible and there are an
absolutely terrible way of
um backing up your private key uh and we
have so many problems in the industry
with compromised Keys software wallets
being vulnerable to malware and to come
to supply chain attacks uh which is
quite scary like a single npm Library
can like completely wreck your wallet
security and of course you know we have
social engineering attacks like for
example with board dapes and generally
all of those things can be solved by
multi-factor authentication and on on
the Chain we call this multisigs and
wire multi-6 kind of a silver bullet uh
so first of all by having multiple Keys
uh or you you can think of it as
multiple shards of a single private key
but it's actually multiple Keys
um you can actually onboard users
without making them write down a seed
and without worrying that they would
lose access to their account so
basically a simple example would be uh
to have a key on your laptop or ant on
your phone you can also recover your
account with methods like social
recovery not Argent pioneered but
there's also other ways of recovery you
can also generally do multi-factor
authentication which is way more secure
and prevents you from malware and of
course you have resistance to hacks and
compromised keys for example we have
malware on one of the devices you will
not be that vulnerable
so
um there are two ways to achieve a
multicycle on an evm chain uh one of
them is smart contract wallets and a lot
of you have heard about account
obstructions and account obstructions
are basically a way uh to pave the way
forward for smart contract wallets but I
prefer to call this like smart smart
contract wallets I prefer to call all
these Technologies smart contract
wallets or smart wallets for short and
this is basically where each account is
a smart contract which allows for any
custom execution logic including multi-6
of course and then MPC refers to
multi-party computation and in the
context of wallets it means that it
allows you to have like threshold
signatures so you can sign by the
signature could be by multiple parties
or you can do N Out of them so like two
out of three and let's start by boosting
some myths about smart wallets so one of
them is that smart wallets cannot sign
messages and I'm sure that many of you
have heard that but the reality is that
smartwatch can sign messages are just
fine you just need a bit of custom Logic
for verification which is the ip1271
then another one is that smart wallets
and I've heard that in the past that
they produce different address for each
chain so it's kind of tough to use but
that's not really true because you have
create two now and you can create
accounts counter factually at the same
address on all evm chains again it was
mentioned in the panel and then the
other one is the gas overhead gas
overhead still exists but it's got on a
lot less in the last years again thanks
to thanks to proxies minimal proxies and
thanks to counter factual deployment
unlike NPC smart worlds can do many more
things than just multi-6 they can do
time logs they can do spending limits
again something that was fantastically
covered on the panel and this also
allows for Recovery mechanisms like
social recovery
and for example seedless onboarding like
we have on our buyer wallet just with an
email and a password while not
compromising non-custodial nature of the
wallet it's also mutable which means
that you can change the authentication
scheme like you can start with with
seedless onboarding account where you
have an email and a password and then
also become more versed in crypto you
can upgrade this to a dresser or a
ledger and you can you can set the
Tracer and The Ledger to be like the
sole owner of the account without
changing the address without having to
move funds which is amazing then you
have gas obstructions which allows which
allow you to pay for transactions and
stable coins so like if you're a new
user on boarding on crypto to crypto you
can sign up with an email and a password
then fund your account with an on-ramp
and then you would receive usdt and you
will be able to swap that for example
for Rita without having either for gas
and of course you can batch transactions
so do multiple things in in one
transaction again a fantastic example
from Argent was the nft shopping cart
but a simple example would be on uni
swap when you have an approval the
approval would get batched together with
with transaction so you wouldn't have to
do it separately and there are more
exotic use cases like for example custom
cryptography like enabling the nist
curve which would allow using iOS
Biometrics and web authentication
um and there are there are of course
some drawbacks of smart wallets and some
adoption challenges like you have gas
overhead
as mentioned as mentioned previously
it's not so much as people think you
just have around one to two thousand gas
per transaction and around forty
thousand gas for deployment which is
added to your first transaction but the
main challenge is DAP adoption so a lot
of Dubs either block smart contracts
intentionally because they believe that
that's not a wallet and it's some sort
of automation that's basically what nft
means and the other thing is many dabs
just don't Implement smart contract
signing but this is quite easy to fix so
when would you want to use MPC wallets
so one of the benefits of NPC wallets is
off chain recovery which is cheaper and
easier but not as flexible then the
other thing is they're truly cross
chains so there's no dependence on Smart
contracts so for example you can support
Bitcoin or you can support basically any
chain that uses elliptical signatures
there's no gas overhead and there's no
kind of drama with the signatures like
signatures just work with any dab but
there are some problems with MPC and one
of those is that they require custom
cryptography and there are not that many
libraries so far and they're not that
well battle tested as normal electrical
signature libraries and it's kind of an
experimental technology but then the
main problem I think is the immutable
authentication rules which basically
means that when you create like for
example two out of three multisig you
cannot just swap out one of the signers
you cannot make it like two out of four
or you cannot make it like a three out
of four it's just immutable once you
create it that's it which also creates
some problems with recovery right so you
can recover the account once but then
you can change one of the keys so like
if you lost the key then it's kind of
bad
um and it's also limited to multi6 you
don't have time logs so that a lot that
limits you a lot as well there's no gas
obstructions but that's not in the slide
because it's more of a benefit of smart
contract wallets and finally the also a
very big thing you cannot use it with a
hardware wallet at least not before
those Hardware wallets recommend that of
course you can argue that you can pull
requests to those Hardware wallets but
at the moment you can't and as a
conclusion I would say that smart
contracts and account obstructions are
the way to go uh does the future proof
way of doing accounts on ethereum and on
other evm chains on layer tools and Etc
but mood Parts computation can be
fantastic for like some temporary use
cases before dubs kind of get their
stuff together
um but yeah definitely smart contract
wallets are way better for the future so
that's it so one of the critiques for
the smart contract wallets right now is
that in the end you still need a wallet
with a private key to manage it yeah
yeah both in Taos and multi-six so how
do I mean any any ideas of how of how to
overcome it well that's completely true
but like on a fundamental level you
cannot get away from the secret right in
any form of authentication you have some
sort of a secret just the great thing
about smart contract wallets is that you
can manage it and you can make it work
not like as a single private key which
is like the source of our authentication
and like the one true point of
authentication but you can have multiple
of those Secrets like a regular uh like
like you have on for example on Google
or on Facebook or on regular like human
friendly uh authentication scheme so it
is a private key but you shouldn't think
of it as a private key because eoa
wallets they're the private Keys King is
like the single secret number where
everything comes from unlike smart
contract wallets