cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/83813

One of the biggest benefits for adoption is that it allows new users to onboard into the decentralized world of crypto without ever having to worry about complicated seed phrases or understand the technical process of setting up a wallet.

They can simply open a smart account via a smartphone app using a fingerprint or face scanner.

While there are plenty of crypto wallets currently available as smartphone apps, they come with numerous security risks and are unsuitable for holding larger amounts of cryptocurrency due to the risk of hacks. But because smart accounts enable the cryptographic keys to be stored on the phone’s hardware security module, phone wallets can now be almost as safe as a hardware wallet.

If a user loses their phone, time-locked social recovery means a group of trusted friends or even a commercial service can help them recover it without putting the enclosed funds at risk.

They gave a hypothetical example of someone who wants to go on holidays and have their bills paid automatically from their crypto wallet, after they get paid in two weeks’ time.

You can already do this from bank accounts of course, or via a custodial wallet, but both require trusting a centralized service. The paper explains that the difficulty doing it on Ethereum is because it has two types of accounts: user accounts (also known as externally owned accounts, or EOAs) and smart contract accounts.

“A user account, controlled by a private key, can send transactions,” explains Visa Crypto. “A smart contract has associated code that can be executed, however, a smart contract cannot initiate transactions on its own. Transactions must always originate from a user account and be signed by the user.”