Author: Chloe, IOSG Ventures
At the Devcon 6 conference held in Bogota, Tomasz Tunguz mentioned some statistics of Web3.0: the cumulative DAU of the mainstream public chains is about 2.5 million, while the DAU of the traditional Internet is 5 billion, the former is barely enough for 0.05% of the latter . From the perspective of the supply side, there are about 16,000 developers developing in Web3.0, and the total number of developers in the world has reached 27 million, and Web3 developers account for less than 0.06%. Therefore, Web3.0 is still far from mass adoption.
Wallet, as the entrance of Web3.0, its user experience directly affects when the encryption industry can usher in large-scale adoption. Although the major wallets have made great efforts in this regard, in the eyes of ordinary users, the wallet experience is still unsatisfactory. Although escrow wallets are easy to use, security is a big hidden danger, and incidents of wallet theft emerge in endlessly. Although self-hosted wallets are relatively secure, the way to keep long mnemonic words and private keys is much more complicated than the traditional Internet username-password system. According to a research report by Chainalysis, as of 2021, about 20% of the bitcoins in circulation will be lost because the owner does not remember the private key. Many people may have doubts, why can't we apply traditional verification methods to Web3.0?
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Image source: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com
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Image source: https://www.ledger.com/academy/blockchain/what-are-public-keys-and-private-keys
As mentioned earlier, external accounts do not have code logic. If you want to introduce more complex logic to achieve other functions, such as multi-signature, etc., it cannot be done directly on external accounts. So, what is the current way to solve this problem? The author will introduce two solutions that are considered to be the most feasible and effective: MPC wallet and smart contract wallet.
MPC Wallet
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Image source: https://sepior.com/products/advanced-mpc-wallet
The concept of "multi-party participation" in the MPC wallet is somewhat similar to that of the "multi-signature wallet", but in fact, although both can realize the "multi-signature" function, the implementation methods of the two are different. The multi-signature wallets we are familiar with before, such as Gnosis Safe, etc., are wallets built on smart contracts. The verification logic is defined in the contract. For example, if you need to verify a transaction, you need more than one private key, or five middle keys At least three private keys are required for verification. This type of wallet is a type of smart wallet that will be mentioned later. The MPC wallet, on the other hand, decomposes a private key into multiple fragments, and the verification process only involves one private key. And the computing network is off-chain and has nothing to do with smart contracts.
Smart Wallet
Smart contract wallets, as the name suggests, are wallets based on smart contracts rather than external accounts. There are already many smart contract wallets on the market, but because these smart contracts are customized, lack a unified industry standard, and have contract loopholes and compatibility with other contracts, they have not been widely used. Recently, smart contract wallets have become a hot topic again because of the significant progress of the "account abstraction" proposal EIP-4337. So what exactly does account abstraction mean? After the account abstraction is realized, what kind of new experience can it bring to users? Before understanding the account abstraction on Ethereum, we first need to understand the abstraction concept in CS.
"Abstract" is one of the most important concepts in computer science. It refers to providing the necessary key information to the outside world while hiding its background implementation details, so that developers only need to focus on this abstraction when dealing with the tasks of an abstraction layer. layer. To give an example that is close to life: when we want to use the TV as a viewer, we only need to be familiar with the operations that we need to know as a TV viewer, such as how to turn on and off the power, adjust the volume, switch channels, connect other devices such as game consoles, DVDs and more. Viewers don't need to understand the implementation details inside the TV, such as how the TV receives signals through cables, how to convert signals, how to present these signals on the TV screen, and so on. These implementation details are what people who build TVs need to know. As a viewer, we only need to control the TV through external interfaces, such as power button, remote control, DVD, etc.
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Image source: https://miro.medium.com/
Summarize
Summarize
After introducing the two wallets, readers may have doubts, which of these two solutions is better? The author thinks it is difficult to make a comparison, because MPC wallets and smart contract wallets are not essentially solving problems at the same level. MPC wallet is an off-chain solution that can control both ordinary wallets based on external accounts and smart wallets. The two have their own use cases and do not conflict. Therefore, the author will list the opportunities and challenges of the two schemes for you.
As an off-chain solution, the MPC wallet does not involve changes in the consensus layer or contract layer of Ethereum. The cost for users is lower and it is more feasible in the short term. In addition, it is more advantageous in some special usage scenarios such as cross-chain keys. The smart contract wallet is a systematic upgrade of Ethereum, which can bring more new experiences and use cases to users. However, account abstraction is a big project that requires “inspiring teachers and mobilizing people”, requiring other smart contracts, developers, and the Ethereum architecture to cooperate with upgrades. Excessive difficulty in practical operation has prevented the vision proposed in 2015 from being fully implemented today. For users of smart contract wallets, the most direct problem is that the cost of using the wallet will increase, and fees need to be paid from the creation of the wallet.
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