In crypto, we must constantly decide between good user experience, functionality, and self-custody. We have yet to see the trifecta in action.
The world is waiting for experiences that make interacting with onchain assets and dapps as easy as it is for a 5 year old to purchase thousands of dollars of products from Amazon.
As we write, there are more than 600 million people in the world that hold or interact with crypto, with the global transaction volume edging $140 billion a week.
But a large amount of this is institutional in nature, and retail investors need ways to interact with crypto safely and easily.
In order to achieve this, however, we must zoom into (and improve) the initial access point to the onchain world: the wallet.
Crypto Wallets Today
If you are a crypto user today, you are very familiar with most of the wallets out there: Metamask, Phantom, Coinbase, Safe, Rabby, among hundreds of others.
As you may also know, not all wallets are built the same.
Aside from each wallet’s features, there is a larger distinction that separates the different types. Today, there are two main types of wallets: Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) and Smart Contract Accounts, or smart accounts.
Smart accounts are uniquely primed to evolve into the future.
The Real Difference
Technically speaking, smart accounts differ from EOAs because the private key of the wallet is decoupled from the account itself. This distinction means that because smart accounts use smart contracts for the authorization of transactions, they do not rely on the private key, but instead on a program or smart contract to execute transactions.
By decoupling the account from the signing mechanism, a smart account can be programmed and customized with specific features that make the user experience much more efficient, and tailored to specific use cases.
For example, smart accounts enable features such as multisig, gas abstraction, batch transactions, and sponsored transactions. Plus, they remove the need to memorize a seed phrase.
They also enable features that boost wallet security, including multi-factor authentication, passkeys, time locks, spending limits, and key rotations, among many more.
In short, smart accounts allow wallet providers to address all of the terrible UI that crypto users have come to learn to navigate, and start to create an experience that is not only enjoyable, but familiar to users of apps we already know and love. These accounts are also uniquely primed to evolve into the future.
There are many aspects that make smart accounts a very clear favorite here. From account recovery and security to capabilities and programmability, smart accounts are simply, technically, more sophisticated than their alternatives.
Addition Through Abstraction
Ignore the cheesy title of this section, but acknowledge that the benefit is real. Smart accounts are the improved evolution of EOAs, and their programmability brings the opportunity to abstract away many of the common pain points of interacting with web3.
But what do we mean by abstraction, and why is it so important?
In the art world, abstract art does not attempt to represent an accurate depiction of a visual reality. Instead, this medium uses shapes, colours, forms, and gestural marks to achieve its effect (source).
Abstraction in tech is similar, in the sense that users attain a desired outcome without having to complete or be aware of each tiny step that happens under the hood. Properly executed, the abstraction is sufficient to convey a whole world of meaning, sometimes complex, without having to illustrate it in every detail.
Crypto users have come to know and love things like chain abstraction and gas abstraction, but these developments are only the beginning of what can be abstracted away for the sake of experience. For example, most DeFi users are familiar with the annoyance of signing multiple transactions, approving tokens, and swapping between chains to top up for gas, among many other annoying tasks that make utilizing DeFi cumbersome.
Smart accounts offer the tools to iron out many of those wrinkles. So when you want to execute a transaction, you can do it in a single click. Most wallets are not quite at this stage yet, but it’s coming – and it’s coming soon.
The Dream Wallet is a Smart Account
There has been a lot of discussion on social media lately around the pieces that are required to create a “dream wallet.” The tl;dr is that all of the pieces already exist, with smart accounts living at the center, and the world is anxiously awaiting someone to build it.
But there’s good news. Coinshift Personal is a smart account that is set to transform the future of self-custodial smart accounts.
Coinshift Personal isn’t just another wallet. It’s a gateway into RWAs, stablecoins, and DeFi — all designed with the user in mind and optimized to use abstraction to make the experience as simple as it is safe.
The “dream wallet” is here. Let’s see what we can build together.