Beyond Account Abstraction - Better Experiences and Safety using Cryptography with James Bourque

"Most of us Web3 folks can agree that “Accounts” - how end-users identify on and utilize Web3 networks - need to improve if we’re ever going to approach mainstream adoption. With Externally-Owned Accounts (EOAs), Web3 introduced unprecedented agency and sovereignty to users. The cost, however, was a lot of responsibility: one single key, one single point-of-failure. Lose your key, lose your crypto, and that’s it. Recently, a lot of discussions have circled around Account Abstraction, or using smart contracts to decouple “accounts” - an end-user’s digital assets and interactions - from signing. Smart contract Account Abstraction provides a ton of advantages for users, including reducing that single point of failure, improving security, and enabling more sophisticated programmed functionality. Smart Contract Account Abstraction is not without its compromises though. Code and engineering risk, interactivity with other dApps, inter-network operability and portability, and affordability, amongst others, would suffer as a result. In this presentation, we’d like to explore what’s Beyond Account Abstraction, and what opportunities we have to employ leading-edge cryptography and infrastructure to achieve the same - or better - features for end-users without such substantial compromises. We’ll introduce and apply concepts like secure multiparty computation (SMPC), various threshold signature schemes, and key resharing to externally-owned accounts, as well as discuss their advantages and disadvantages. At the end of the day, we’re all looking to make Web3 more human-friendly. As a community, we have more tools available than smart contracts and purpose-specific networks. By presenting these concepts in an accessible way, we hope to encourage web3 buidlers to re-examine their assumptions of what’s possible, and continue to work for a safer, more mainstream Web3." James Bourque Infrastructure + Scalability Stage