How popular are smart contract wallets, really?

Transcript

cool let's start hello everyone my name is Toby I'm a product manager at gnosis and I am going to talk about smart contract wallets they have been becoming quite popular and we ignore this we are building as my contract wallet ourselves the canosa safe and this presentation will be about how popular what smart contract wallets really are and first I'm going to yeah first I'm going to do a small recap

or brief recap on what smart contract bullets are and where they are great and then I'm going to give an overview of which ones out there and I try to tackle those two questions how popular are they and more importantly also important how much are they trust it and so and I will conclude this presentation with a brief overview of what we are planning a kenosis so let's dive straight into what a smart contract wallets again the key difference to regular wallets or so-called externally on the counts is around access control so in a regular wallet you have one single private key that key controls the account you sign

transactions with it if you lose it you cannot sign cannot sign transactions anymore if someone steals it that person has full control on the other hand side smart contract wallets they are controlled via their contract code so this contract code defines who has access and when and under which circumstances so you can implement recovery schemes you can implement things such as allowances or daily limits and you can implement also multi signature schemes so essentially you know instead of just requiring one private key or the signature of a private key you could say you need two signatures or three or more second difference and that's more of a UX

they're friends also is around transaction fees in a regular wallet all the fees the gas fees have to be paid in either generally in smart contract wallets in the code you in a smart contract code you can define that they can be paid by third parties so a third party could collect all the signatures submit a transaction to the ethan blockchain at a contract code verifies if yeah this transaction is allowed and then it gets executed and thereby you can implement gasless transactions essentially someone or the third party just pays for all transaction fees or you can implement

token payments so instead of using either a wallet owner can use a token for transaction fees things like this are on a specific circumstance as possible in regular wallets as well there's things such as the gas station network but it only works with specific gaps with with smart contract wallets this works with every transaction and the last difference I want to mention is also a UX difference with regular wallets you would have if there's more than one transaction happening the classic example is token approval and then you're doing your action on on your DAP

you would have to sign two transactions after each other with the smart contract wallet you can batch them together and only sign once they're still executed sequentially but there's only one signature only one pop-up basically happening there are many more differences but those are just the three I want to mention right now coming back on a first that question what smart contract well it exists out there at the term isn't really properly defined this is the list I came up with so I will go into detail about of the the first four so but there's way more there's monolith there was a great

presentation yesterday their main selling point is that they offer a Fiat off-ramp where a credit card there's Dharma this is a stable coin only smart contract wallet which allows you to generate passive interest on your stable coins there's pillar among a lot of things they focus on payments there's a bridge they focus a lot on the developer experience there's aetherium something that launched just two weeks ago and then there's also inside of and the USS Porter from maker those I believe don't market themselves as like as will wallet such as the other ones but they use a very similar concept under the hood so they use proxy

contracts they're very popular but I basically didn't consider them in the rest of this presentation since they are not your traditional wallet and yeah I would have loved to include more of those but times limited so I'm kind of gonna be focusing on those four I thought about how can we answer this question how popular are those wallets and how much are they trusted so and basically by just looking at unchained data because this is what the only thing I have access to for all of those wallets and a simple measure for popularity is how many instances to exist and how many transactions have

been made and simple measure for trust is how much funds they store because essentially well all those contracts have been audited people looked at them they were written very carefully but Trust altum Utley can only exist if they have been on the Ethier maenette for a period of time with a lot of funds because then they become a target for white hat or black hat hackers alike and only then you can really be sure maybe even then you can't be a hundred percent sure but the probability of a problem is decreasing so it's not really like very scientifically investigation the purpose

of this was just to get a feeling for how much are they used right now and well how much are they trusted and I looked at Unchained statistics of those measures above which are pulled by Arjuna lytx thank you for that service I love it basically the index D if they aren't blockchain and you can query it by a SQL and yeah the data I pulled was from a little bit more than one week ago the first one was multi sick again disclaimer I work for kenosis so I might be a little bit biased here but this one was released initially in 2017 it is a classic Multi signature wallet used by many icos for example diagnosis

token sale and other crypto projects and right now it's pretty much the standard basically the most trusted solution for high values of crystal your crypto phone storage bays web interface that we provide also a standalone desktop version and there's also multis which also gave a presentation earlier today they're using the contracts as well and since I only looked at unchained data I couldn't differentiate whether it was basically someone used the contracts by emojis or by are one of the interfaces that Moses provides alright this is some raw data so in total we have more than 1

million ether stored there have been more than three thousand contracts deployed which made more than forty thousand transactions and there's also more than half a billion of US dollars worth of ESU twenties in all those contracts stored combined just a number of contracts doesn't tell much someone could just deploy a number of contracts and don't do anything with it so to dig deeper a little bit I also put numbers how many contracts of more than one ether and how many contracts made more than ten transactions compared to the three thousand those numbers well a little bit smaller also on the on the right-hand side I put two tables the

upper one is a list of the top multi-sig contracts by their store ether amount and so we see that the top four store each more than 100,000 ether and on the the lower right corner there is a table which shows two top multi six by the number of transactions so the top four which are not necessarily the same like above it up for made more than one thousand transactions again just so to get a little bit of feeling a little bit of an understanding of the district version of the ether value and also of the transactions that have been made those exact same numbers I pulled for

all the other well it's as well so we can compare them next one and that signal is safe this is the successor that we develop AG gnosis of the wallet mentioned before it's a new set of smart contracts which are different we have like they've been formally verified we have a weapon the phase available under this link there is an Android and an iOS app and again here Unni Logan is using those contracts Alex 90 presentation earlier at this conference so same thing here I didn't differentiate which you know the safes have been deployed by one of

our interfaces or via uni logon to this date or so when I pulled their data more than 80-thousand ether have been stored in gnosis slaves there are more than 2000 contracts deployed which made more than 10000 transactions and yeah more than 2 million in u.s. dollars in US attorneys are stored currently also again the two numbers how many contracts hold more than one ether and how many contracts made more than 10 transactions yeah on the right-hand side you see there's four contracts which hold more than 10,000 ether and there is basically

six contracts which made more than six 300 transactions so numbers are lower compared to the osmotic but there is already quite an amount of assets in those contracts next one argent there was just the presentation on that by junior at EDC like an hour ago basically argent is a mobile wallet and we've seen that UX it's great use they have direct app integration they pay for all transactions within their wallet the most interesting feature in my opinion is social recovery

by our guardians essentially that concept that a pre-defined group of friends or devices or essentially accounts can give access to your wallet in case you lost your phone and yeah if I'm not mistaken and actually I should have probably compared the numbers with the team beforehand I looked at their contract factories and this is how I got the addresses of all argent wallets so there's more than 10,000 ether stolen argent wallets there is almost 14,000 contracts deployed which made more than

36,000 transactions and also quite a significant amount of year C 20 tokens is stored in there especially the fact that there's compound UCC and compound die showing up here shows that well I have a direct app integration with compound so that seems to be used also comparing to is safe there's more contracts that actually hold more than one either and also more contracts that are used or that made more intense transactions so it seems like this is a wallet which is more for a daily use case or used and as a daily use case right now on right hand side you see again the distribution of store ether so

there's four contracts which hold more than 300 ether and there is four contracts which made more than 600 transactions the last one I would like to mention here is dapper Dapper was released last year it is built by the team behind crypto kitties and that's also what it's built for so it's built for games and collectibles they pay for all transactions as well and it is available as the Chrome extension so yeah their main the main purpose was that you can use it for for for crypto kitties I believe and this is represented in the numbers

as well it's not a wallet that's used for high-value ether storage but they are compared to their three examples before quite some contracts deployed more than 27,000 which made more than half a million of transactions not too many you see trainees compared to the other wallets again but a lot of n of T's in there and yeah there are two tables on the right-hand sides basically proved the same thing if you would like to check out the data sources there's dashboards on Jun analytics public wants which you can check out there you can also see which queries who

have been used and yeah if there's any intercourse in the data I would love to learn how how it can be improved as part of this presentation I really only looked at very basic metrics there's so many things to look at in the future we could look at transaction types is it just simply if the transfers is there easy to open transfers is it any Deb interactions we could look at retention and frequency of use for single wallets we could look at other asset types and also probably most interesting we could somehow compare the activity of smart

contract wallets to the activity of wallets based on externally on accounts in order to really know how popular they are and probably many more things we could do coming back to the original question now how popular a smart contract wallets I put all the numbers again here on this table the four wallets on this side and on the on top you see the different metrics we see when it comes to fund storage most trusted is not a sick but there is a significant amount of ether in both

argentinos a safe contract and we're combining all those this is roughly one percent of the ether supply and circulation right now when you look at a little bit the contract activity there it becomes clear that argent and dapper are basically the ones that are popular right now that people use sometimes even on a daily basis when you look at the number of transactions just from those four we see that if you sum if we sum this up it is basically less than there's transactions on aetherium

daily so I'm just so we get a feeling for how many transactions are happening and yeah there you see 20 token value is quite similar to the ether stored so what I conclude from this is smart contract wallets are trusted I mean there is essentially not a not only looking at this but looking at those two numbers even new smart contract wallets they are trusted but they're not quite there yet like their popularity there's still way to go and there's still things to improve so we can make the advantages of smart contract wallets really apparent to users and that's why I would like to conclude this presentation with

what we are playing with the gross is safe first where we are is we have this Foundation which is the smart contracts and then we currently have mobile apps and we have a web interface with mobile apps that have been released first we learned a lot we try to put something which is usable for both crypto newbies and technical users we ended up with something in between which is not really working for either site and so we're trying to change this we decided also with the web interface that we would like to first build something which is

flexible enough which is really transparent not transparent but which is really showing all the details of which something which is usable for crypto savvy users because even even then even us even projects currently in this space and they are bound to use well sometimes even the kenosis multi-sig which is it is usable but it's very hard to use sometimes so yes we are planning on changing that so we are planning on building a flexible multi signature interface and we have - we are planning on aligning our kind mobile app to that to first solve it for crypto savvy users

and then in the future once that is tackled we can try to include others more potentially second one I mentioned it on the previous slide a little bit and there is quite some untapped potential in smart but in no small basic there's more than 1 million ether in there and dep interaction is very hard you would have to copy and paste transaction data in order to really take part in d5 for instance and while it's probable it's very unlikely that we get all of those 1 million ether into defy there's still a high probability to get

some of it in there if we provide a better way for smart contract interaction so we are planning on offering a possibility for third party developers to integrate into our you know the safe interface with safe apps if you'd like to would like to learn more about this please talk to me after the presentation and last but not least we're working on a thing called contract proxy kit it is our attempt to unify the used proxy contracts out there for interoperability so currently each contract uses a little bit of a different proxy and then also a different master copy with storage

layout is not really compatible so we always say well beyond bank but currently you can't easily take your bank account from one well that wallet and move it to the other one so we are trying to change this Plus this should be a way for third-party developers of depth to leverage advantages of smart contract wallets such as transaction batching or token payment so this is the plan that we have with this contract proxy kit that's it thank you very much yeah I do got any questions I was just curious how

far is the standardization so can the app developers now use the proxy contract yes they're in our like with with our proxy kit you could do it in a limited fashion there are other approaches out there such as uni login etherium you could use it as well but we're we just started with that like a month ago but it is like there's a there's an initial release so you could give this a try and we were very eager to learn about the shortcomings of it and to improve it and do you already have like from what I have the people

from blockchains LLC will be using the same proxy contracts do you have more adoption they will be using the Yeti contracts but I'm not aware of how they will be interfacing with it and as far as I know they haven't released that yet so maybe they contributed to those numbers maybe they're like but as far as I know they didn't yet good thank you [Applause]