A session key experience with Account Abstraction and Silent Network

Introduction

AI agents—autonomous, AI-driven systems—are increasingly performing tasks such as market analysis, social media engagement, and on-chain activities with minimal human intervention.

Smart accounts are revolutionizing the crypto landscape by serving as the secure and programmable backbone for AI agents. These accounts empower AI to manage funds autonomously, seamlessly interact with decentralized applications, and execute tasks with precision—all while enforcing strict safeguards and operational boundaries. With features like session keys enabled through account abstraction, AI agents can perform predefined actions without constant user intervention.

Session keys x MPC Network

Session keys are just temporary keys generated by the user and instantiated in their AA wallet, along with some limitations. It's like giving your AA wallet an additional temporary master to listen to, but with some limitations. These limitations/permissions for the session keys are usually set in a smart contract (the user's AA wallet). And since this consumes storage and compute of the blockchain, it is costly and slow.

In this case, an MPC network can

• offload the storage and compute for this use case while at the same time

• securing the session keys from a single point of failure.

Now, let's look at how we can achieve that with Silent Network and an Account Abstraction SDK.

Initiating a session key with Silent Network

Let's consider a case where the user wants to delegate a session key to a wallet provider (for example, dydx), which has an agent that takes care of some agentic trades for the user.

1. A user, using their authentication (EoA or a Passkey), can initiate a new distributed key with the Silent network.

   1. The user is also able to set some specialized permissions and an ephemeral session keypair for the MPC key.
   2. The wallet provider ephemeral session key pair can now use this ephemeral session keypair to authorize its requests to the Silent Network without the user's intervention.

   3. The network then outputs a Public key corresponding to the newly generated distributed MPC key.

2. This newly generated MPC key's Public Key can then be initialized with the user's Smart Contract Wallet as a session key.

3. Now, the session key is ready to be used by the Wallet Provider AI trading agent, however, secured by a distributed Silent Network with safeguards (permissions)

Now, let's look at how the Wallet provider (/AI agent) can use the distributed session keys.

Using the session key with Silent Network

In the same case, now that the wallet provider (/AI agent) has the ephemeral session key pair, it can initiate a new signature generation request within the network.

1. The wallet provider (/AI agent) initiates a new signature generation request (for the corresponding MPC key) to the network signed by the ephemeral session key pair.

2. The network parses the request message and checks alongside the permissions that have been set to the MPC key.

3. Once the permissions have been verified, the network engages in an MPC TSS protocol to generate a distributed signature.

4. The signature now then can be used by the account abstraction SDK to publish the transaction on the chain, thereby executing a trade on the user's behalf while operating within the guardrails (permissions) set by the user

5. There, you have your first agentic operation leveraging the power of DISTRIBUTED session keys on the Silent network! 🥳