MPC + Account Abstraction Kits

Eliminating Single points of failure in Smart Contract Accounts with Silent Shard SDK

The Account Abstraction Paradigm

The advent of the Account abstraction (AA) paradigm was great for the EVM ecosystem as it set forth to blur the lines between EOAs and Smart Contract Accounts. It brought about making our EVM wallets smarter while trying to preserve their security to an extent.

Account abstraction enables us to utilize the abilities of a smart contract and delegate the authority of the smart contract to one particular signer i.e. the owner of the wallet - be it an EOA or, in advanced constructions, construed form of it through other signing mechanisms like passkeys.

The good and the bad

The AA paradigm came with a bunch of added advantages like Batching Transactions, Paying Gas fees with a token of your choice, delegating gas fees to paymasters, social recovery, Adding multi-signatures, etc.

Which is great! But..

While the account is abstracted with additional functionality, you still need the EOA keys to generate signatures and pass the instructions to the Smart Contract Account. Your upgraded Smart contract account still faces a Single Point of Failure in the form of the EOA keys.

Social Recovery makes it easier to recover your accounts when lost but doesn't protect you from compromised key shares. If your EOA keys are compromised, your account remains at the mercy of attackers. If you had used Multi-Signature to preserve the integrity of your account, you would be using up an extra gas fee per transaction to compensate for security.

There is still a need for an abstraction of the key management at a level to remove single points of failure in Smart Contract Accounts. Multi-party computation enables such an abstraction.

This beautiful confluence between MPC and Account abstraction yields secure key management with robust and programmable transaction validation techniques that AA offers.

Multi-Party Computation: Gasless and secure

Multi-Party Computation - Threshold Signature Schemes (MPC-TSS) are proven cryptographic technologies in which a distributed key is generated between the participating devices and a distributed signature is generated by the devices without each device revealing its secret share to another.

In this section of the documentation, we use Multi-Party Computation to solve this facet of Account Abstraction: Eliminating a Single Point of failure.

We use the Silent Shard Duo SDK along with the Silent Shard Mobile Application (Android, iOS) to create a Distributed Smart Contract account between your desktop and your phone eliminating any single point of failure as seen in a normal EOA.

Such an experience is now live in MetaMask as a Snap. You can try it out today with your MetaMask wallet:

There are configurations other than the above demonstrated {Browser + Silent Shard Mobile App} also possible. Contact us for more information.

Your favourite Account Abstraction Kits now also have a Silent Shard 2-Party MPC integration!

Choose from the list below:

The scope for MPC doesn't end here. Stay tuned for more added functionality and improvements in the Account Abstraction stack with our Multi-Party SDK.

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