Ambire Wins an EF Account Abstraction Grant 2023
Ambire is amongst only 18 projects selected to receive an ERC-4337 Account Abstraction grant from the Ethereum Foundation.
We are thrilled to announce that Ambire is one of 18 winning projects to be selected to receive an Ethereum Foundation ERC-4337 Account Abstraction 2023 grant. This grant initiative will support 18 teams in their efforts to build diverse projects centered around ERC-4337, the main EIP behind Account Abstraction.
The Account Abstraction Grants 2023
In February 2023, the Ethereum Foundation announced a grants round solely focused on Account Abstraction and ERC-4337. Their aim was to encourage development, research, and education around one of the hottest topics recently — Account Abstraction, as well as the necessary infrastructure to support it.
Over 150 projects submitted grant proposals, and we couldn’t be happier to share that Ambire is one of 18 winning teams! To quote the Ethereum Foundation:
Each team’s project uniquely aligns with the goals of the ERC-4337 AA grant, and we believe that the outcomes of these endeavours will ripple through the ecosystem, inspiring new ideas and opportunities for collaboration.
You can check out all the winning projects here.
Ambire’s Proposal: Self-custodial Email/Password Authentication via DKIM
Ambire is a mobile & web-based account abstraction wallet launched in late 2021, the first to offer self-custodial account creation using email/password authentication, thanks to an underlying 2/2 multisig.
After one year of running on Mainnet and other EVM networks, we believe that email/password accounts demonstrate how account abstraction makes Ethereum more inclusive. We found out that email-based registration is perfect for onboarding people who aren’t technical or patient enough to deal with seed phrases or browser extensions.
When using email/password signers, Ambire creates a 2/2 multisig under the hood for you, where one of the keys is on your device and encrypted with the password, while the other is responsible for verifying email confirmation codes and “lives” on a back-end HSM. Both keys are necessary to control the account, but one is enough to trigger the time-locked recovery procedure.
We provide a recovery option for email/password accounts in case the password or email access is lost. If a transaction was signed with only one of the keys, the contract triggers a time-lock recovery for 72 hours. After 72 hours, the missing key from the transaction will be replaced with a new one provided by the user in the same transaction. (For more details, read our security model or more generally, our whitepaper.)
Right now, the private key related to email is managed by Ambire’s back-end. Also, the user experience of time-lock transactions is not native to the Web2 world and is often confusing, especially when combined with a cross-chain experience, where you have to trigger the time-lock on each of the networks you use.
With our Account Abstraction Grants 2023 proposal, we want to implement email recovery with DKIM. With this, we will allow the user to not share sensitive information with the wallet provider. Additionally, it will allow the time lock to be dropped.
<< Check our full grant submission here >>
We are excited to see what the future brings. It’s definitely looking bright with Account Abstraction paving the way to onboarding the next billion users of Ethereum!
