Our Vision Beyond Key Management - Chain Abstraction
Broken User Experiences
The recent surge in L1s and rollups has led to increased complexity in user experience, specifically in managing wallets, keys, and assets across all these ecosystems.
Key Management
While shared custody solutions, which divide the key between a user and the solution provider, have significantly enhanced onboarding they don’t fully solve the key management problem -
Not Truly Seedless - the user is still required to keep track of key shares (recovery and/or a device share)
Inflexible - it’s challenging to customize authentication/recovery policies and innovate on the signing experience (UX) because any key operation (signing, etc) always requires user input.
Fragmentation
The emergence of rollups, chains, and embedded wallets undeniably brings a new problem into focus - fragmentation of a user's accounts and assets.
Wallet Management - Users need to set up new wallets for every chain and dapp they adopt (if it uses an embedded account).
Asset Fragmentation - User assets are dispersed across dapps, rollups, appchains, and other ecosystems.
Cold Start - Users must understand concepts such as gas tokens and bridging before they can even begin in a new ecosystem.
User Journey
Suppose you're a user exploring four different dapps on Base and Solana that support embedded wallets. Your current experience might include:
Managing keys for four different accounts
Funding all these accounts and transferring assets between them
Figuring out how to bridge from one chain to another, or using a Centralized Exchange (CEX) for this purpose
Ensuring each account has sufficient gas for transactions
These actions are just a few of the many potential tasks. The time and effort required to navigate these steps can significantly impact conversion rates for projects and builders.
With Passport Protocol, our aim is to simplify this process into three steps across any dapp and any chain: Create, Fund, and Transact.
A Dedicated Ecosystem For Users
Our goal at 0xPass after distributed key management will be to power chain abstraction with universal accounts.
These are gasless, seedless, and programmable accounts that can transact on any dapp across all chains.
We will achieve our goal through the following phases, executed in parallel when feasible.
Phase 1 - Key Management
Our focus in phase 1 is MPC-based and distributed key management.
Passport will provide seedless onboarding experiences, programmable keys and authenticate users in a trustless way through enclaves.
Distributed MPC Network
Unlike shared custody solutions that split the key shares between a user and a provider, Passport Protocol spreads key shares entirely among nodes in our network. Enclaves and our MPC protocol ensure key shares are shielded from node operators and that the private key is never reconstructed in whole.
Programmable Private Key
Since the entire key resides within the network, it’s also now fully programmable. Developers can programmatically customize auth, recovery rules as well as signing logic.
Trust-Minimized Authentication
User authentication today relies on centralized providers - either a developer’s own backend or a third party solution. But since the authenticator maps the end-user to a key, it’s crucial that this layer is not malicious.
Authentication within Passport, is trust-minimized. Since our authenticator nodes run enclaves, Passport’s network cannot interfere with or maliciously operate on incoming authentication requests.
Phase 2 - Universal Account
In Phase 2, Passport will feature a universal account, chain abstracted and secured by our MPC network. This account will be managed by an intent-driven solver network for handling cross-chain interactions.
Further enhanced by relayers and decentralized messaging protocols, the solver network will make the universal account gasless and capable of even auto-bridging assets.
Representing The Universal Account
The universal account, located within the MPC network, will store user credentials, authentication, recovery policies, and will consolidate child accounts. These child accounts are wallets that have the ability to sign transactions across different chains and ecosystems.
Private keys for these accounts, when linked with relevant web2 authentication methods, will be securely retained through our distributed MPC network developed in phase 1.
Intents - Powered by a Solver Network
Operations at the universal account layer, which include auto-bridging, gas sponsorships/abstraction, and auto swapping, are organized as intents which in turn are processed by our solver network.
When a user intends to perform a certain action, the solver network processes this intent and constructs a series of complete transaction requests. The solvers interact with our MPC network, obtain signatures for the transactions from the correct account, and forward them to the appropriate chains for settlement.
Relayers and decentralized cross-chain messaging protocols, also run within the solver network, will provide users with a gasless and bridgeless experience as they navigate through web3.
Phase 3 - Ecosystem Development
At its core, Passport Protocol is a network of nodes that can sign transactions and trustlessly run any off-chain compute.
During phase 3, our goal is to expand on these capabilities by opening up the network to developers who wish to create new use cases on Passport:
Network Participation - Increase incentives for third parties to participate in our key management and solver networks.
Passport Apps - Motivate developers to create a new category of applications for universal account holders. These Passport Apps include:
UX Plugins - These plugins enhance the user experience and function within the parameters of the global account. Examples include pre-built authentication and signing flows, privacy-preserving KYC plugins, zk-based login experiences, new gas sponsorship models, and more.
Agents - Programs and bots within the network that can act independently and operate securely on behalf of a user, within the boundaries set by them.
Build With Us!
Want to build on our distributed key management network? Make sure to sign up on our site for access and we will follow up immediately - https://0xpass.io/