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Smart Contract Wallets - Utopia, Waymont, SAFE & 1confirmation
Recorded: July 5, 2023 Duration: 0:48:09Space Recording
Full Transcription
Hey folks, how's it going?
Are you all able to hear me and everything?
Hey, hey.
Loud and clear.
What's good?
What's good?
Pretty good.
Coming from Berlin today.
Yeah, are you going to ECC as well?
I know you guys are hosting an event, I believe.
Yes, we are hosting, sponsoring, attending multiple events.
I think we actually have a public page where you have the list of all safe people going
to ECC and the different events we'll be going to.
So if you're interested in meeting us, talking with the team, you can of course look it up.
But yeah, quite a few of us, including myself, will be going to ECC.
Are you going there?
No, sadly not.
I don't think I'll be at ECC.
But yeah, excited to hear more about what you guys have been up to there.
And yeah.
What's up, Richard?
How's it going, man?
Good.
How's everyone?
Good, good.
Thanks for pulling up to our spaces.
Really, really excited to just kind of learn more about how you're thinking about the wallet
space.
And then the Weymouth folks as well.
What's up?
Yo, what's up?
How you guys doing?
Hey, nice to meet you, everyone.
Good, yeah.
I think we'll maybe get started in like two, three minutes so we could just kind of vibe
for a bit.
And yeah, I'm really excited.
Yeah.
All right.
Cool.
This session will be recorded.
So just in case, just wanted to let y'all know about that.
Yeah, I think we can get started and then people will just kind of pull up and pull through.
And we could just have a really good kind of in-depth discussion around smart contract
wallets.
And I thought that would be a really good place to start today.
I think we have some really, really smart and awesome builders and people who think about
it from a products area as well.
So I'm just generally really excited to host something around this space just because I
think we've been thinking about it at Utopia as well and just thinking a lot about those
implications.
So maybe to just fire it off, what we'd love to do is a quick round of intros and then
get into a few kind of like high level, beginner level questions.
But then I think what's really exciting about this space is going to be diving a bit deeper
into like things around technical trade-offs, some of the things that excite you about the
space that might be relatively differentiated versus other solutions.
And then we'll have like kind of like five to ten minutes at the very end where we're
just going to actually break down a few tweets that I think I've kind of pulled from each
of you guys that talk a tiny bit around the smart contract wallet space.
So that's kind of the rough agenda for everyone here who's listening in.
Really, really appreciate you all coming through.
Maybe to start it off, my name is Kaido.
I'm a co-founder at Utopia.
Really what we are is a interface on top of SAFE to help organizations and DAOs and a lot
of companies kind of manage their finances.
And that's kind of where we've been playing a role, kind of accelerating this idea of smart
contract wallets in the SAFE ecosystem.
But yeah, this is super quick background on us.
We're about two years old and just been really focused on this space.
And we think there's a really exciting angle with all the things that SAFE is building,
whether it's like Zodiac modules, et cetera, et cetera.
So I'll pass it off real quick.
I'll pass it off to you maybe, Richard.
And then I'd love to hear what you've been off to, what's interesting to you about the
space.
Then we'll just do some quick popcorns and then we'll get into a few more kind of
technically related questions.
Cool.
I'll start with the quick intro.
So I'm Richard.
I run a fund called One Confirmation.
We've been around since 2017 investing at the seed stage.
We've actually been investing in smart contract wallets since 2019.
So we made a bet on Ethereum.
So Ethereum and Argent were two of the first smart contract wallets that started around
2019.
Something we've been thinking about for a while.
Unfortunately, what happened was during DeFi summer, gas prices became extremely high.
So the cost of deployment of smart contract wallets was like over $20 per new user.
So the customer onboarding cost was like way too high.
It didn't make any sense to onboard new users to smart contract wallets.
So Ethereum pivoted to HopProtocol, which is now one of the leading bridges for Ethereum
and L2s.
But, you know, since then, you know, 4337s come around.
It's drastically changed the smart contract wallet landscape.
So now I think the timing is much better for smart contract wallets.
And, you know, infrastructure, the landscape is just much different now than it was in 2019.
And we actually made a bet recently in a company called Pimlico, which is building the infrastructure
for bundlers and paymasters for smart contract wallets.
Appreciate that, Richard.
I think it's going to be exciting to hear maybe even like a retrospective over the past
half decade on how we thought about smart contract wallets and what's changed today.
So we'll have a few questions around that.
But let's pass it off to some of the Waymark folks.
We'll love to hear a quick intro on what you guys have been up to.
I think there's going to be a tweet that I'm going to dig up on your guys's end around
the decision to commit to safe and smart contract wallets, which I think will be a really fun
breakdown.
But, yeah, let's pass it off to the Waymark folks real quick.
Awesome.
Hey, everybody.
What's up?
This is Jay.
Basically, at a high level, what we do at Waymark is we help crypto natives secure their
crypto and do long term planning like inheritance, make it safe and easy to use their crypto
and all that stuff.
So as Kido mentioned, we actually started with MPC and then we migrated to be building on top
of which safe.
So excited to talk about that transition.
And hey, everyone.
I'm Sukhan, also part of the Waymark team.
I help out a lot on the engineering and product side and kind of oversaw that maybe slightly
painful transition from MPC to smart contract wallets and then eventually safe as well.
So excited to give a little bit more context on that transition.
Awesome.
And then we'll pass it off to Clem from Safe and would love to kind of hear what you've
been up to.
I know you've been digging quite deep into the MPC space, so I think that will be fun
as well.
Hi, everyone.
My name is Clem.
I work as a product lead for SafeCore.
Safe is currently split into two main parts.
SafeCore, which is smart account infrastructure on Ethereum and tooling for builders specifically.
And SafeWallet, which focuses on end users and more end users through our interface for treasury
management and other use cases.
Safe has been around for quite a while.
I think it started from Gnosis in 2017.
And gradually, you know, we built up quite a critical piece of infrastructure.
And, you know, today, I think the overall value stored in safe contracts is roughly around
60 billion.
And we are, you know, quite heavily involved in account abstraction through different initiatives
and also working with MPC at different levels.
And I think, yeah, the two concepts are very interesting to explore conceptually.
And from a product perspective, it also makes sense, I think, to explore a little bit the
technicalities of each and, yeah, their pros and cons.
So, yeah, I'm super excited to be here and to hear and listen to everyone's thoughts on
the topic.
Totally, totally.
Appreciate the quick intros from all of you guys.
I think what I'd love to do now is kind of get into a few of the higher level questions
that kind of set the scene for the way we think about account abstractions for our contract
wallets, all of these kind of buzzwords and jargons I think we hear today.
But like, as Richard pointed out, like there's been an investment into this space or just even
an acknowledgement since, you know, 2019, right?
So maybe let's break it down at a high level.
And this is a question for anybody on the panel to break down some of these terms.
And then, again, we'll get into more kind of technical conversations around this space.
But maybe the high level question that I'd love to ask the panelists here is, can we simply
clarify or just from a high level, describe the distinction between smart contract wallets
and MPC?
What are the clear differences?
What are some of the things, you know, that are worth kind of acknowledging?
I'll pass it off to whoever who wants to take this and we can just build on each other's
thoughts here.
I mean, I'm happy to go first.
So I guess there's like three components in your question, right?
Smart contract wallets, account abstraction and MPC and how those three differ from one
another.
I guess a smart contract wallet in and of itself is only a type of account that has the ability
to hold code.
I would describe MPC as a specific type of technology that can be used to generate keys and that's
particularly useful for some specific authentication use cases.
And I would call account abstraction or describe account abstraction as a process towards which,
you know, the industry is shifting towards in order to improve the overall usability of
Web3 based products.
So, yeah, this is, I guess, in a very, very high level how I would describe each one of these
components that you mentioned.
Awesome.
Does anybody else want to jump in in regards to some of these kind of clarifications and
differences?
Yeah, I can maybe add to that a little bit and just say that perhaps in this case, when
you say MPC, you're referring to MPC in the use case of self-custody.
So I think it might be worth just talking about the problems that these address in the first
place, which is right now with EOAs, if you have the private key, you can do anything within
the rules of the EVM, right?
And if you don't have the private key, then you can do nothing.
Where MPC and smart contract wallets come in is they add this intermediate step of additional
verification that we can add, right?
Like additional security levels and additional security layers on top of this private key.
So MPC being a cryptographic algorithm that can generate a pre-sharded private key across
different parties, and then each of those parties can sign a signature, and those signatures
can be combined to form a valid signature that can be posted to the blockchain.
While, yeah, I think claims explanation of smart contract wallets already kind of covers
everything there.
And completely agree with account abstraction being more of a movement towards a new form
of self-custody within the space and moving away from needing to be reliant on centralized
relays and allowing for decentralized bundlers, which maybe we can get into later.
I guess one thing I'll add is like MPC only solves like one small part of the user experience,
which is key management.
So, you know, you can like shard your private key among several signers.
So you have like some level of security there.
But improving user experience goes beyond like just key management.
Like there's things like batch transactions where you can do 10 different transactions in
a single transaction.
And that's like uniquely possible with account abstraction.
Meta transaction is another cool feature where someone else can pay for the gas on behalf of
you for your transaction.
That's another feature enabled by account abstraction.
This is why I believe that MPC is only a subset of account abstraction.
And account abstraction is the future for like improving user experience of wallets just because
it's a lot more powerful.
You can do a lot more things beyond just solving the custody and like key management issue.
Really appreciate these breakdowns from the team.
I think clarifying these terms where MPCs are a subset of account abstraction and thinking
about that space quite deeply is going to be really important.
And I think maybe what I'd love to do is pass it off to Clem, who might have an opinionated
thought regarding the way we think about.
I heard that you said with SAFE that you are thinking about MPC at a certain product level.
But maybe, Clem, I'd love to hear you touch on it.
As part of the team at SAFE, can you share your kind of approach for the concept of smart contract
wallets?
And, you know, I think you guys had a pretty good post around account abstraction and how
it was already here.
Maybe you could touch on that.
And then what I'd love to do is actually transition that into like more of a builder
conversation around like the key technical and design differences.
But why don't we touch on some kind of SAFE's experience with some of the spaces here?
Yes, so indeed, I think there's been a few posts shared directly by SAFE exploring, you
know, our own experience with smart wallets and smart contract wallets.
I think maybe before explaining the attributes of it, if this is what the question is and how
it relates to SAFE, I must say that right now there is also this tendency in the space
to call smart contract wallets accounts, right?
And I think, as I mentioned earlier, from my own opinion, right, we are looking at the
most basic level, an account that holds any logic.
So a smart account can also be from an end user perspective or from a developer perspective,
something else than an actual wallet in the most common sense in crypto, meaning a tool
to emit transactions from an end user, right?
And from the SAFE perspective, I think this is where, you know, we have this kind of division
in the product portfolio where we have SAFE core, which is our venture and kind of englobes
different initiatives that we try to build up the account infrastructure layer.
And then we have the wallet part, which is looking specifically at showcasing some of the
possible features on the, on, at the wallet experience level to end users.
And, you know, the, I think the primary or the first kind of feature that, among the first
features that, you know, SAFE introduced was the ability for a smart contract to actually
be governed by multiple signers, meaning multiple keys to then, you know, execute, to execute calls
or not.
And this custom logic is ultimately, you know, very useful because it allows for multiple
people to interact with a particular account, but it also opens up the door for, you know,
end users to set up their own rules and define what kind of key setup and authentication setup
they want for their own particular use case.
But that's, again, I think in the context of using smart accounts as wallets, whereas today,
you know, you can also as a, an application builder, you can pretty much like build an entire,
you know, DAP based on smart account logic.
And actually in the end, you know, most decentralized applications are to an extent smart accounts.
So, yeah, I think in the context of SAFE and SAFE Core specifically, and I'm going to try
to be quick because I don't want to talk for too long.
We are right now working with Web3Off and, you know, we're talking to multiple partners
in the MPC space and we do realize that there are challenges and actually a lot of kind of
bad public perception around MPC because in some setup, you know, people are saying
that multiparty computation for EOAs is primarily, you know, can have the tendency to be non-self
custodial, but actually because we can leverage the diversity of multiple keys connecting to
an account, we can de-risk some of the limitations that MPCs introduce.
And right now, you know, we are exploring ways where we can actually more natively integrate
MPC technology into the SAFE stack without, you know, forcing the user into maybe relying
fully on it, but instead, you know, also having ways for users to authenticate themselves
and connect to their accounts and secure their accounts without solely relying on it.
But in the quest of improved user experience, MPCs actually have, you know, a fair amount
of utility and I think they've shown at least great results from the pure, you know, user
experience value that they created over a short period of time.
So I think, you know, they don't go head to head to head, but instead kind of more head
in hand in my view.
And, you know, we work with it.
And I think there's only like, we're only touching the tip of the iceberg in terms of
like, what, how we can, you know, use those shares and distribute those shares in a way
that still respects the principle of self-custody and while, while maximizing user experience.
So yeah, I, yeah, I hope this answers your question somehow.
No, no.
Appreciate that breakdown there for sure.
And maybe one way to kind of transition that conversation is talking a bit about like
this concept of hybrid custody, which I think you guys have been thinking about as well.
And knowing that they work hand in hand, I thought it would also be helpful to kind of
get a good idea of maybe how the Weymouth team thinks about this.
And maybe we could actually dive a bit deeper into like the technical decisions that you
guys have made that made you really kind of move towards, you know, safe in the infrastructure
there versus MPC.
So maybe what we can do is I'll pass it off to you and the Weymouth teams again, and then
maybe Jay can, can jump in as well, but maybe we could transition that conversation here.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So like, like you mentioned, we initially started with MPC and we thought we could get
it secure with a hybrid MPC set up, right?
And at some level you can, it's definitely an improvement over just a raw EOA or ledger
set up.
But ultimately you require the centralized party or in our case Weymouth to hold a key share,
right?
And what that comes with is just an immense amount of cloud infrastructure overhead where
you're storing these keys in cloud HSMs or these secure enclaves.
And you're also dealing with a lot of overhead with network coordination between the different
parties.
So you probably don't want just one key share hosted on your cloud infrastructure, right?
If that gets compromised, then you're just gone.
So you'll usually have multiple key shares scattered across different private cloud subnets,
right?
And then you reduce the single point of failure, but it's still an immense amount of cloud infrastructure.
And the number of attack vectors in terms of mad in the middle attacks just continues to
increase as you try to improve security, right?
So it's quite counterintuitive.
So that was probably the biggest reason we started to move away from MPC and started to look towards
smart contract wallets where we could just add levels of protection within the smart contracts
themselves, right?
We didn't have to worry about any risk associated with the MPC algorithms themselves.
So this is quite an in-depth topic, which we're going to publish a blog post on now,
but I'll quickly summarize it.
Effectively, when you have a hybrid MPC solution, you also need the ability to revoke key shares
from the user.
So that's important if you're adding or removing new signers or you're removing a compromised
signing device from your MPC setup.
Currently, the majority of MPC algorithms don't actually have true key revocation, which I think
there'll be a tweet about this later from Metallic.
But what that means is that even after you've revoked a compromised key share, if a compromised
party was able to collect enough key shares, they would still work and they'd still be able
to access your assets and transfer your funds.
So that's one big issue that doesn't exist with smart contract wallets where you just given the
nature of a multi-sig, right?
You can just remove a signer and add a new one.
And lastly, probably the third biggest reason we moved away was just the complexity and cryptography
risk associated with MPC algorithms.
So MPC, just as a concept in cryptography, exists outside of cryptocurrency as well, right?
And it has many applications in other areas of the world.
So there's an evolving research space here and there's new algorithms coming out.
Fireblocks publishes a lot of research.
Zingo publishes a lot.
But they also publish vulnerability reports, right?
Vulnerabilities that can lead to your assets being entirely lost.
I think the most recent one was published March of this year where BitGo's MPC solution,
you could hack it with getting a single signature produced from that MPC solution, right?
And that was a shot, like, I don't know, five out of seven key share set up.
So as long as you had a signature, you could steal someone's entire, you know, life savings.
So yeah, those are the three big reasons there.
And I can maybe dive a bit deeper into some of them later.
Yeah, I think just adding on to that, really what it came down to was it is possible to build a secure MPC infrastructure, right?
If you get a bunch of really kick-ass cryptographers, a bunch of really kick-ass engineers and spend a lot of time on it, right?
But that doesn't make sense for anybody at an early stage startup, just in terms of resource allocation and everything.
So we said, okay, wow, if we can't go and do this engineering pull, if this just doesn't make sense for us, how can we get rid of it?
How can we make it so that we don't need to pray that the cryptography doesn't get hacked tomorrow?
We don't need to pray that our infrastructure doesn't get hacked or pay millions of dollars to researchers to go and lock it down.
And that's where we just stumbled upon the smart contracts as a solution.
I do think, like with all of this said, this idea of combining account abstraction and MPC is pretty promising.
It's something that we'd consider down the road, but also right now the solution's great, right?
We don't need MPC in our current setup as is.
Totally. Really appreciate this breakdown too.
Panelists, are there any other folks that might want to jump in with questions, thoughts, or notes here as well?
Cool. Makes total sense. I think that's an exciting space.
Maybe, Sikens, we can dive a bit deeper, actually.
I'd love to hear some of the things that you looked at from a technical perspective around kind of the key design trade-offs from a technical perspective of why you chose this as well.
I think you kind of did give a bit of an overview, but maybe if you want to kind of just jam in, jam and kind of give like a quick brain dump of the way you're thinking about things there, that would be cool.
And then we'll transition into another question, but want to give you the space to describe some of the thoughts there too.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. I can maybe talk a bit about, I think one, probably the biggest aspect we focus on is key management, right?
And I spoke a bit about the kind of increase in attack vectors and increase in risk from insider collusion with MPCs when you're maintaining MPC shares.
The reason that happens is this is a whole bunch of issues with effectively role-based access when you're dealing with MPC shares, right?
Given the nature of cryptographic algorithms, if a centralized party is holding key shares and they accumulate enough of them, they'll be able to sign a transaction and execute it on the Ethereum blockchain, right?
With Waymon and our new setup with the smart contract wallets, one big thing we wanted to do was make sure that we could never initiate a transaction.
And that becomes significantly easier when you have a programmable on-chain account, right?
So perhaps, yeah, one big difference in our design is that, yes, we do hold a private key that signs transactions as well, but it can never initiate a transaction on your assets, right?
The only thing we can ever do is reject transactions or, you know, let them pass through.
And what we do there is effectively check, okay, was this transaction authorized by SSO?
So was the user logged in with Google and Apple?
Did they also authorize this transaction with Biometrix on their own device, which that's checked on-chain as well?
And does this transaction fit into their transaction policies, right?
Just really the basic checks you'd want on top of your assets to make sure that in any scenario they can't get hacked and taking away any control from Waymon.
So we tried pretty hard within the team to really attack our own stack and we're pretty confident we can't.
Love it, love it.
And maybe we can transition this conversation as well into key management.
I think, Richard, you touched a bit around the fact that maybe one assumption that many people have around this concept is smart contract wallets versus MPC-based wallets is simply just around key management.
I'm curious to hear if there's anything outside of that space and maybe the distinctions between these two things that excite you just generally.
Yeah, one of the cool features of smart contract wallets is being able to do batch transactions.
So using DeFi as a good example, if you want to LP and stake, it might be 10 different transactions you have to do from swapping tokens to approving the token for the smart contract to depositing and then to get your LP tokens
and then having to stake those tokens in a new contract.
And each of those actions is like a separate transaction where you have to sign a transaction, pay gas for that transaction, and then wait several blocks for that to happen.
And you can kind of bundle all of that into a single transaction, a single batch transaction with account abstraction.
Before this had to be done on-chain with smart contract wallets in 2019, but now with 4337 going live this year, there's a new concept called user operations where you submit these transactions, pseudo transactions, to almost like a private mempool.
And then there's these third-party workers called bundlers that will take these transactions, bundle them up, and then submit them as a real transaction on-chain.
So now it's really easy for dApps, say if you're like building a prediction market that has like a series of complex transactions, you can all compress that all into a single transaction.
So it's just one click for the end user, it simplifies the user experience by a lot.
And like that's like one of the cool features of account abstraction that's like beyond just like key management, which is like a common misconception that people have about like MPC versus account abstraction, it's just key management.
There's a lot more like batch transactions, which I explained about.
Meta transactions is another one, basically allowing a third party to pay for gas on behalf of users.
So this is cool for a dApp if they want to subsidize gas fees to onboard for like users that are like brand new and like they want to sponsor their first five transactions for that particular dApp.
They could do that with meta transactions and pay masters, just like there's a whole like a wide open array of like new use cases enabled by account abstraction.
Love it. Appreciate that breakdown as well.
I think that's a really good distinction to make, which is it's simply not just key management.
But yeah, batch transactions, meta transactions, a lot of the pay masters folks, I see that there's Christophe here as well, which I think is one of the companies that you founded with Pimlico, which is which is cool to see.
Nice to see you, Christophe. But really good stuff.
Is there anything else? Maybe I'll kind of open up this question to all panelists because I know we've been kind of going deeper into specific sections.
But is there anything else that excites you about just kind of the distinctions here and anybody want to kind of build on top of Richard's points here?
Yeah, maybe on the whole pay master aspect, I think I agree with Richard in that it's kind of an underrated point that isn't really talked about, mainly because one of the biggest problems with new users onboarding to crypto is paying gas fees.
Right. And I can anecdotally, like recall experiences where friends have been sent to USDC for a payment or being airdropped tokens from attending an event or airdropped an NFT.
And they can't really do anything with it because they don't have Ethereum to pay for gas.
Right. So I think, yeah, just kind of wanted to emphasize that the pay masters aspect, the pay masters feature really does solve a huge problem for new user onboarding and a huge unlock for really just the future of self-custody.
Right. It's kind of crazy to think that I hope that in two years or in one year where we're not using MetaMask anymore and instead using Weymount, of course.
Love it. Love it. And I think maybe one thing I'd love to share, Richard, is one of the tweets that you had that I think that was a really fun, spicy take a long time ago.
Actually, I think it was at the beginning of this year. I don't actually have a specific question around the tweet that you had here, but maybe you could walk us through your thought process on this hot take of why you think it's of why you think this may be.
I don't know if it's maybe just a combination of your previous questions and answers that you might have answered here already.
But maybe if you have to distill it down, like, why do you think you had this taken? Why do you think the future is going to be this way?
Yeah, well, for disclosure, I actually stole the spicy tweet from Christoph, who, like, told me about this in one of our many discussions.
But basically, like, you know, MPC wallets have been around for a long time, and it's just kind of incremental iterations upon iterations of, like, improving the user, like, the key management user experience.
But, like, I feel like that's just kind of hitting a dead end where there's only so much you can improve on, like key management and, like, the big wide open, like, green field that, like, no one's really talking about are things like bundlers, paymasters, metatransactions, batch transactions.
I think that's super, super underrated when it comes to improving the crypto user experience.
And, like, all of that is enabled by account abstraction.
So that's why I feel like account abstraction is, like, a zero to one innovation.
That's the idea has been around since, like, 2016, but it's really only been practical since March of this year when 4337 was deployed onto mainnet.
Whereas, like, MPC is just, like, strictly the subset of solving key management problem in crypto.
And there's way more you can do with account abstraction.
Love it.
Love it.
Without falling into the details of it, it's also worth maybe mentioning that there has been a lot of relaying technologies out there, you know, for the past years,
including through OpenZeppelin, good partner of us as well.
Gelato allows for sponsored and metatransaction.
I think, personally, I think the most interesting value proposition behind 4337 remains the decentralization of relayers and, you know, having a decentralized mempool.
But it's worth noting that right now, you know, those mempools are typically still managed by, you know, centralized service providers.
So there's a way, you know, there's a way for us to go until we actually do reach that vision of a fully decentralized relay.
Yeah, yeah.
Love it.
Love it.
And I think maybe a quick question to ask here is, what does it take for us to eventually get to a fully decentralized relay?
What catalysts and what are the high-level things that you think we need for us to get to that point?
I mean, I think the core 4337 team has very good ideas on how to get there, including, you know, using L2s and roll-up technology as a playground to try and push for somewhat of a more native account abstraction directly, you know, at a protocol level.
Right now, 4337 being pushed directly through contracts, so at the application layer introduces some complexities in terms of compatibility, development, tooling, and, you know, cost as well to deploy and maintain for users.
So I think, yeah, there's the idea that by focusing on DAP-specific or roll-ups and L2s where we can iterate in an environment where maybe the gas costs are lower and, you know, there's like lower latency as well.
We can tweak the specification of 4337 up until, you know, we can push it directly at the protocol level on these L2s and eventually maybe push that down to, you know, an L1 specification.
But, you know, there's, you know, there's, there's, there's, there's steps and, and I think, yeah, again, like I think the 4337 guys are doing a good job right now looking into ways they can push that through optimism-based roll-ups and, and others.
And I think that's a fairly good strategy, but maybe others have different ideas.
Awesome. No, yeah, I think that, that makes a ton of sense here as well.
Was wondering if anybody else has any kind of spicy or hot takes around, around just this thought of smart contract wallets.
I think those are a few of the questions that I think we want to run through today.
But is there anything else that kind of is that the team here and the panelists want to add in regards to just the space as a whole?
Maybe a fun question to ask is if we zoom out and think five, 10 years out from now, I guess we could think about the ideal UX, which Richard kind of just touches on as well.
But are there any catalysts for the way we think about growth of smart contract wallets that we think are going to be really exciting outside of just like even the infralayer?
Maybe we could kind of zoom out and think about just like the way you think about wallets as a whole.
Maybe we'll pass off to the Weymouth folks to touch on like what you think the end vision of Weymouth could look like, especially from a wallet perspective.
Yeah.
Oh, two comments on the right first.
You can go for us.
I don't.
Okay.
Here's, here's a spicy take and I'm still thinking it through whether like I fully believe this, but I going, going to Richard's take of MPC wallets or a dead end account abstraction is the way to go.
I actually don't think account abstraction in itself is what is super valuable, right?
I think we've had smart contract wallets for a long time.
I think it's more the narrative of smart contract wallets and getting all this developer excitement around it.
I don't think it's the 4337 spec itself.
That is the impetus that will drive a lot of users from EOAs and traditional EOAs into smart contract wallets.
Curious, curious if anybody disagrees with that.
Yeah, that's an interesting take.
I guess, yeah, on the topic of what's going to drive account abstraction adoption, I see kind of the main arguments I see are one, top down, which is like Vitalik, memeing, and like kind of creating a shelling point of the entire ecosystem onto this standard.
Two would be like the wallets, like MetaMask, as well as upstarts like Weymont, just creating better products.
And then three would be from the dApps wanting this like for their end users.
I would probably make the spicy take that dApps are going to be the drivers of account abstraction adoption in the next five years, that there will be some killer consumer facing app that onboards tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of new users to crypto that like needs a solution like this.
So they'll either build their own, they'll partner with a wallet to do it, and they kind of force the, and because they're successful, the entire industry then just kind of copies their onboarding flow.
So that's one thesis I have.
I think I agree with Jay.
Thank you, Richard.
Maybe you wanted to say anything, something else?
That's it for Jay.
Okay.
Yeah, I think I agree with Jay.
I think, you know, I like the kind of momentum behind account abstraction and also how 4237 has rallied the industry behind the acceptance of the fact that the user experience overall in the space is just not acceptable for most users and most people on this planet.
I do think, though, that, like, we're kind of having this, we're kind of creating this eco-chamber right now.
And maybe that's another hot take, but I feel like despite, like, so many infrastructure providers now offering, you know, bundlers, paymaster services,
and looking into really supporting infrastructure for this view of account abstraction that 4237 proposes,
I'm still doubting that this abstraction will truly onboard, you know, the next billion users.
Like, I think, you know, working on infrastructure is a requirement for us to get to this point, but I do feel like that that landscape as it stands is not in a capacity or does not have a value proposition that's, like, good enough to get those users.
And so, you know, I think, yeah, ultimately, I think we also need to make sure that we are outward facing and not only looking to serve the existing market,
but also build infrastructure for use cases that maybe make, you know, sense maybe beyond DeFi, right?
Maybe it is DeFi and DeFi is enough for us to, you know, continue as an industry and evolve because it's already such a core primitive of, you know, today's world, right?
Like, like finance as a primitive accounting as a primitive, however we want to describe that.
But I do feel like there's a lot more potential for decentralized, well, smart accounts to be used in many contexts.
And, you know, here, account abstraction really is just also in and of itself.
While NPCs and smart accounts are pieces of the puzzle of account abstraction, I think account abstraction is yet another piece of the puzzle that we need to solve for Web3.
That's kind of my take on this.
Totally.
Appreciate these takes as well.
I really appreciate the spicy takes.
I feel like we need more of those.
I think the funny thing is you just realize a lot of Ethereum improvement proposals are just proposals for social consensus.
And I think this is going to be really interesting when there's hundreds of wallet providers and there's just tons of, like, dApps now as well, right?
So it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out because it's more of a governance coordination challenge than it might be even a technical one, which is both encouraging but also potentially a calm.
But, no, I really, really appreciate just the points and notes here from the rest of the panelists.
One thing that I wanted to do was, like, if there's anybody who has a Q&A or a quick question that they want to kind of jump in with, feel free.
Maybe you guys can just raise your hands or request to speak.
But other than that, like, if there's any kind of closing notes that the team wants to bring up or that the panelists wants to bring up, feel free.
But, yeah, I think we'll just kind of round this out with a Q&A and we'll go from there as well.
But is there any of the panelists who have any kind of notes or last words that they kind of want to bring up?
Yeah, I guess I can get started to close up here.
I would definitely say MPC wallets alone are a dead end, agreeing with Richard's hot take.
I would say that MPC plus account abstraction, potentially promising, but maybe a hyper-optimization.
But I think what we are all aligned on is smart contract wallets are the future.
It remains to be seen how that future plays out and what exactly gets us there.
But I think that we at Weymont, serving these crypto natives, we're really excited about trying to realize that future.
So thanks for hosting this.
Totally.
I think it's going to be a really fun question to ask, right, which is,
what are some of the unique features or value propositions that smart contract wallets enable that are 10x better than,
let's just say, MetaMask or the current status quo of how we operate on chain today?
And I think the companies who do figure that out, I think there is enough talent and enough money in the ecosystem for us to eventually figure it out.
But hopefully we can accelerate that future as a whole.
So, yeah, I appreciate a lot of the notes from the panelists.
Does anybody want to kind of come up for any questions?
Again, no worries.
If not, we can just wrap it up here.
But if any of the folks here have any questions, I see some really awesome people.
Richard, I listened to your podcast yesterday.
Or the CTO of Safe, I see him out here.
And a few others.
But is there any other people that might want to come up for any questions?
We'll just wait a few seconds.
If not, no worries.
Cool.
Appreciate everyone's thoughts today.
And thank you all for jumping on for these notes.
We'll share the recording in a few, in a day or two.
And, yeah, appreciate everyone's thoughts here.
And we're looking forward to just building the future of smart contract wallets together.
Richard, appreciate the work you do with One Confirmation.
And Jay and Sikens from Weymont.
And Safe, as always, as well.
So thank you all for listening in.
Thank you all for the questions and notes.
And we'll see you all next time.
Cheers, everyone.
Cheers.
Host
Utopia
from
Utopia Labs
