Evolution of Web3 Wallets and the Creation of Portkey
The introduction of different types of Web3 wallets and Portkey, the smart contract wallet with DID solution born from aelf’s ecosystem
The importance of wallet to Web3
Web3, in spite of being mentioned and promoted almost everywhere, is yet not one hundred percent defined. But at its core, is decentralized ownership.
As human beings, we find our value within ourselves as well as from our possessions. It’s true in the real world and so should be in the digital one. Web3 is expected to enable users to have ownership of their possessions in the digital world, such as their identities, digital collectibles, tokens and so forth. In the meantime, Web3 wallet provides a place where users store all their digital possessions and manifests the users’ digital ownership.
Given the above, Web3 wallet has been growing and evolving along with the development of blockchain industry and Web3 at large. Below are the four most commonly used Web3 wallets: cold wallet, non-custodial EOA wallet, custodial EOA wallet and the most recent smart contract wallet.
Web3 Wallet Evolution
Cold Wallet
Cold wallets are devices which store users’ cryptos and digital assets offline. These hardware wallets are truly safe, yet not at zero costs. In fact, the price of such wallets could reach several hundred dollars. A portion of your assets reserved for crypto investment or Web3 has to be spared for a wallet first, and that’s even before you actually start the experience. Also, an offline hardware wallet is also not convenient since you need to carry it for usage and risk getting lost offline as well.
Non-custodial EOA Wallet
If you don’t want to carry a cold wallet all the time, you find a whole universe of EOA (Externally Owned Account) wallets. You can find them on mobile phones, Chrome browsers, or websites. There are non-custodial EOA wallets like Metamask, and custodial EOA wallets like exchange wallets.
An EOA wallet account is often free to create, however, you must remember a series of 12 or 24-word seed phrases which are called mnemonics and secret keys to prevent them from leaking and hacking. The mnemonics and keys are your only proof of ownership, once you forget them, say farewell to your possessions. What’s even worse? These keys can be easily exploited and stolen. In spite of being a little more convenient than a cold wallet, the EOA wallet is still somewhat troublesome and insecure.
Custodial EOA Wallet / Exchange Wallet
When it comes to user convenience, most newbie Web3 users will go to a centralized crypto exchange to create an account, i.e. to obtain a custodial EOA wallet. The exchange wallet allows you to log in via social information just like how you do it for Web2. However, it compromises security badly given the centralized nature of the exchange who actually have control of your wallet keys.
You may have heard of the infamous FTX collapse where the withdrawal of user funds was suspended and investor confidence plunged further in this crypto winter. As the classic saying goes: Not your keys, not your coins. It best illustrates how insecure custodial EOA wallets are.
CA Wallet: Next Generation of Web3 Wallet
Then here comes the smart contract wallet or contract account (CA) wallets. Smart contract wallet by its name is wallet deployed on smart contracts. The beauty of smart contract wallets is that it almost combines all the advantages of other Web3 wallets:
- Easy to use as custodial EOA wallet — you can log in with social info without the need to use seed phrases.
- Secure — decentralized like non-custodial EOA wallet and also eliminates EOA’s risk of losing keys and accounts. CA wallets can be recovered in social ways.
Moreover, since smart contract wallets are managed by coded smart contracts rather than by keys, it vastly increases the functionalities of the wallet, such as bundled transactions, emergency account freezing, whitelisting, guardians set-up and so forth. It also lowers the threshold for Web2 users to enter Web3 via CA wallets.
However, perfect as it sounds, CA wallets have their own drawbacks. Since CA wallet is deployed on smart contracts, account related behaviors such as account creation, guardian additions and so forth will trigger the execution of smart contracts’ code which appears in the form of transactions. And the processing of the these will require gas fee payment.
Portkey: The First Ready-to-Use CA Wallet — Lower Cost, Fully Decentralized
Portkey is a CA wallet built on the high-performance layer 1 aelf network.
Ready to Use
Compared to many wallets in the process of developing EIP 4337 or implementing ERC 4337 to become CA wallets, Portkey is a ready-to-use smart contract which realizes Vitalik’s vision for smart contract wallets already! Moreover, Portkey has other features making it advantageous than peer CA wallets.
Lower Cost
As mentioned above, CA wallet account behavior will require the payment of gas fees. For networks like Ethereum, it can be expensive to pay ETH. However, Portkey inserts the super delegation mechanism having the delegatees pay the fees for the users. In this way, users can create and manage their CA wallet account at zero cost.
More importantly, as Portkey is built on aelf network, which is more scalable and highly performant than Ethereum, the gas fee is much lower for regular transactions. Moreover, accounts with balances higher than a particular figure are exempted from certain amount of transaction fees every day.
Fully Decentralized
Portkey is a fully decentralized CA wallet. In addition to having guardians, Portkey is also a CA wallet embedded with DID solution with the design of verifiers. The verifiers are responsible for verifying the account activities, making Portkey more decentralized with less singular point risk.
With the above mentioned, Portkey is poised to become the first CA wallet to migrate Web2 users and developers into Web3 providing easy, secure, low cost and multi-functional wallet user experiences.
For more details, visit Portkey at:
