Block Zero Stage | Exploring Account Abstraction on NEAR Protocol

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1. 0:00

   amazing say it all the time there are so many exciting things happening on near um and next up I mean we have an amazing person coming up uh to give us a speech on exploring a account abstraction on your protocol uh Edward Chu from you know you probably know meteor wallet uh let's give a round of applause for Edward everybody my test hello guys um is it clear good I'm a little bit nervous now but

2. 0:43

   thanks for coming so my name is adward and today I'll be I'm I'm very proud to sort of share my P perspective on account abstractions especially on near and why we are so bullish about it so before we start just a little bit uh about me I'm Edward I'm from Malaysia um I've been a software developer with more than five years of experience highly passionate about Defi and crypto that's why we are here I'm the founder of near thinker Union and also media wallet and I'm also current currently the

3. 1:14

   maintainer of Min wallet why should you stay why should you listen to this session I think there are a couple of things that is very interesting and can bring value to you so first of all I think you would love to know a little bit about the abstractions and why we believe there are game changers there are huge thing in abstractions that we have often heard people talk about but today I would like to bring that to you in a very easy to

4. 1:40

   understand way second thing is if you're excited to create on near or even just smart contract but you're not sure about what to do I'm going to share a couple of problems or issues that we're currently facing in terms of like smart contract account and account protractions be it on near or on evm ecosystem maybe there'll will be some Inspirations for you and the last thing will be if you're passionate about boarding well then you must listen to this because smart contract account is all about

5. 2:10

   onboarding so what is account abstractions we all hate jargons and in crypto world is just everywhere you cannot just learn crypto without going through this Jon but in simple words account abstraction just means programmable crypto account or just smart contract account so what is so fascinating about being programmable if we think about account or crypto account essentially it only does one thing which is signing transactions that actually

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   defines a few things first who can sign what are we going to sign how to sign a transaction and when to sign a transactions there are a couple of things that we can sort of hack through and customize it to a certain extent without going to Smart contract account but essentially smart contract account would allow us to do this at a very high high level of freedom and whatever we mentioned just

7. 3:04

   now just sort of enables features like first TFA account recovery daily transaction threshold custody partner and insurance this is particularly interesting because if you think about smart contract account it can sort of provide you with an interface to connect with Oracle and real world API then we've got granular permissions you can just Define the key how many keys do you want to have what permissions they have how long you're going to give them what can they do it's really really into detail and the last

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   thing is with that key you can just sort of enable automation when it comes to signing transactions automating defies deploying strategy and stuff well it might sound like smart contract account is really interesting and really powerful but when we really look at smart contract account day it is definitely not as useful and not as good as we think if we start to compare smart contract account to different type of way that you can manage a wallet you

9. 4:04

   would easily find that smart contract account is actually sort of lag behind if you look at cost you sort of need that gas fee and storage fee when it comes to deploying smart contract account the worst is if you're not on near you're in evm then you just need to deploy it every time you go to a new blockchain second thing easy to use is it really easy to use I think we're going go through this later but right now just think about it every transactions you do is going to cost you $200

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    500% more in terms of gas fees and setting up smart contract account there are many ways that different vendors once you engage in them you might get vendor lockin which doesn't sort of give you that compatibility um in terms of like web tree which we always like third thing is robustness I mean that's really good B because it's basically programmable you can do whatever things you like in terms of security it's good um not as good as

11. 4:55

    Ledger for sure because essentially you still sort of have your wallet key somewhere that's accessible in Access have access to Internet and the last thing is cross chain compatibility this is a really big issue right now there are a couple of solution that we're going to go through but it's generally just not good enough and if you look at this table interesting enough you'll find that the best way right now to on

12. 5:19

    board Mass users is just NPC which is essentially what sort of fast office is doing so here's a shout out to them I think they're definitely doing a great job and then we definitely believe that in a short term at least short to medium term MPC solution is most likely going to be be the most affordable easy to use and also less burden way to onboard users well so we have mentioned a couple of things just now and here let's summarize some of the big problems that

13. 5:48

    we are seeing the first one is fragmented ux or vendor login basically we talked about it just now like you've got couple of different smart contract account vendor they all sort of have their own features that they have their own way of create wallet that means they are not compatible to each other say you have created a smart contract account with vendor a if you go to vendor B and trying to use their wallet it's probably not going to work second thing is

14. 6:11

    inconsistent account across blockchains unfortunately when we talk about account exraction it's often about evm ecosystem it's a good thing and bad thing but evm ecosystem itself is kind of not to say fragmented but has their own implementation how do they support account extractions in what level do they support account exraction is that true smart contract level or is that true um Native protocol level that is

15. 6:35

    still not so compatible with each other third thing is higher gas fee we mentioned about that and the last thing is every account requires gas to deploy if you look at it right now we do have a lot of problems but there are many talents and projects and smart people that trying to resolve these issues if we look at it ERC 66900 is trying to Define how we have the modular smart contract account before this it was just started from

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    Project like safe protocol like rhinestone but right now they're trying to do it on protocol level and then we have um safe broko rhinstone we mentioned just now in terms of like inconsistent account across blockchains we have different parties managing them as well higher gas fee maybe best transactions I'm not so sure about this because it seems like it can reduce gas fee but it has certain conditions and eventually if people is batching your

17. 7:22

    transaction is trying to get that lower gas fee for you they also want to extract some value that's essentially what the what do you call it the just forgot the word but that's essentially what's happening if people is providing you value they would also sort of want to take it either to swap or either to uh maximum value maximum me sorry and the last thing is native gas sponsor this is currently happening on polygons even though it might appear a little bit hard for users to actually get on Bard

18. 7:54

    with smart contract account it is easy for protocol or blockchain itself to just sponsor and and allow users to get on boarded with smart contract account directly so with what we have mentioned just now I think it is very clear that smart contract account might not be the best way for us to onboard the mass users it is very likely that we we are still going to see smart contract account being used only for sophisticated users in specialized area

19. 8:24

    for example organizations where they need security privacy of Del ations in terms of Gamers they always want uninterrupted sessions and the session key can come in and help defi Traders they want automations better strategy nft collectors they want safety and scam prevention social users they want identity and communication that identity is often often connected to the web Che application as well and we have seen all players across this different domains

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    and they are doing pretty well coming back here how about AA on near do we have anything things similar we have mentioned about the current situation of account abstractions on evm what are we seeing on here currently we do have account extension that is sort of equivalent to modular account extractions on evm while we have ch two more J here first is account extension and and second thing is modular account abstractions we're going to talk about it right away so first what is modular

21. 9:24

    smart contract account just now we mentioned about things like vendor lockin and that's another issue that we did mention which is if you deploy your smart contract to your account and you want to upgrade it with more modules or features how are you going to do it is that easy to do maybe or maybe not it often comes to a balance of flexibility and security if you want it to be super simple to be upgradeable then it might

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    comes with security conent and if you want it to be very secure then you probably don't want to touch your smart contract account account as frequent and the last thing is reusability with the things we mentioned just now different smart contract vendor they just sort of have similar set of features for example social recovery to fa and everyone just sort of have their own Solution that's why they sort of on evbm we sort of see

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    projects coming up with modular smart contract account which different party can just create the module or features then they can publish it of course these features come with a certain set of standard interface and whatsoever but anyone can essentially just develop and deliver their own feature and anyone can just plug these features into their account and play it so that just

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    presents to presents to us a more um a solution that's easier to manage upgradeable and reliable so we mentioned about modular smart contract account why is that similar to account extension what is account extension about well on near account extension is actually a collective of any people more than one not just one missing the as there that aims to increase the usability of network and there are a few of them first Global Strat storage second

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    synchronous WM submodules third account m space and a few others disclaimer these are all based on my own researchers on GitHub discussions and stuff I have no idea whether or not they are really being implemented whether or not what I'm trying right what I'm trying to deliver right now really match the outcome of the development whatsoever but here's a few things that I sort of got to know first Global shed storage what it does is it would allow a

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    near protocol a shared storage that anyone sort of just gain access to that would allow us to instead of deploying our own smart contract account to our ID you can punch your accounts to those sets of smart contracts so for example we're probably going to see a very commonly we use social recovery smart contract feature so instead of you deploying that smart contract feature that chunk of code onto your account we have this shared Global Storage instead of doing that you just point it to that

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    now immediately your account get extended with that features and if we have more features like this essentially your account would just be like a Lego blocks that you have different piece of features that you put in and if you don't want them you just disable them it will make things a lot more reusable and composable composable second thing synchronous WM subm modules and this is super interesting one

28. 12:35

    because we have often know NE broko as uh layer one that's quick has very low finality and stuff but if you try to do a swap there might be cases where you might need to wait more than 10 seconds 15 seconds or even 20 seconds if you are missing out some things like for example storage deposit for example you're are communicating through different smart contract because the nature of NE protocol is that it is running transactions in asynchronous way in

29. 13:06

    which a block might not finalize your state of the transactions and it might pass the the rest of the transactions to the next block to be executed so if you are trying to communicate with say five smart contract accounts sorry five smart contract most likely this is going to span across next five to six blocks and if you have things like storage deposit and if we're doing more

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    things then it's essentially going to take like seven to 10 blocks that's why even though near has a around 1 second block times we often still have to wait more than 5 seconds or even 10 seconds synchronous WM subm modules just allowed us to execute things in an environment that is synchronous so if we have this we can sort of put some of our codes in this warom sub modules and then we can

31. 13:57

    execute things within this environment itself that we doesn't have to follow the way near Define asynchronous transactions so in this sub modules it will just finalize the details it will give you the output you just change the state so it can reduce the finality by a lot and the last thing is account name spaces just now we mentioned about global shed storage that is just a shed storage essentially it account name

32. 14:19

    spaces that allows you to extend the features of your smart contract account there are a couple more others um and I just doesn't have enough time to research more about them but based on what we have mentioned just now the outcome would be we are going to see very soon composable near accounts that easily you can easily plug and play with different features and it is extremely

33. 14:43

    cheap to deploy and you will have a lot quicker transactions so how that might look like in the future just now we mentioned about smart contract account and we compare that to different ways to manage your accounts with the account extensions coming in here's the improve Improvement we're going to see so first in term of cost cost is going to be extremely low because now you're not going to redeploy your smart contract over and over again you just going to

34. 15:06

    point your things to the accounts and then it allows you to immediately gain the similar upside of deploying that smart contract account second thing you're going to be able to have a better user experience in which the transaction times is going to be minimized because otherwise if you deploying different features of your smart contract account the cross contract cost is just going to take way too long so having them under the sub

35. 15:29

    module wasm ex sub modules wasm execution environment would just allowed it to be much much quicker and the next Improvement is about cross chain compatibility so this is something Eli just mentioned yesterday about account aggregations of course this is something that we are still not entirely sure what's the detail of implementation but it is pretty possible that this is going to be the way the future the future

36. 15:52

    wallets going to handle cross chain transactions because it just provides you with a much more consistent user experience that you can sort of just inherit the benefits of your smart contract account while still being able to abstract out and interact with deps from different blockchains so after mentioning all this I'm repres representing metor wallets here are the next few things that we're

37. 16:16

    going to do so first we're going to deliver our mobile apps it's sort of like delayed but we're still working very hard on it second thing we're going to work closely with the ecosystem to bring out the full potential of NE protocal the third thing is we'll try our best to deliver the first smart contract account product which is me your savings account this is very interesting just IM imagine that you have all the funds in your non-custom wallet right now and every day you just

38. 16:39

    see extra cash coming in without doing anything else and the money is still there still have 100% control 100% transparent you can withdraw your funds any time and the last thing is we're going to explore the possibilities on modular smart contract account of course this is all it's about so that's it about the sharing if you want want to chat a little bit more about wallet or smart contract account

39. 17:01

    it's my TG and then um that's my Twitter as well and just doing a shout out to vanan and de death group we sort of have a account extraction hack on near broko right now and the URL is abstracting dog so if you interested about smart contract account and you want to try and hack something go ahead and participate in the hackaton so that's it about thank you thank you so much uh nice talk I have one question about account aggregation so when we say account aggregation are

40. 18:00

    we also talking about accounts that are created outside the near ecosystem for example I don't know metamask Phantom and others uh and if so will they still have to go through the meteor ecosystem or will you create an interface where I can you know still use metamask not go through the meteor ecosystem and still use them uh on any dep maybe on near or any other chain that's that's a very good question so again a disclaimer because this thing is

41. 18:32

    rather new I hope what I'm understanding is correct what I'm foreing this is we sort of have the smart contract account on meteor that would just Implement all the logic to verify the transactions before you want to sign anything it sort of control the logic on whether a transaction can be signed on any other blockchain so if you have that you send a transactions on near blockchain it sort of go through all the checking validation and stuff if approved

42. 18:57

    transaction is being signed and that transaction can be propagated to other network through the near validators and stuff so it first inherits the benefits of having smart contract accounts and second thing you can still interact with smart contract orabs on any other blockchains without having the burden of worrying about whether or not I want to care about the smart contract account there why I need to care about that it just abstract out

43. 19:21

    the complexity of other blockchains while you being able to interact with it medor wallet so I guess that's it about it thank you guys