Personal Keys
WaaS and wallets vs. Silk
TL; DR
The next sections are long, so here is a quick summary:
UI looks identical to WaaS, but security guarantees are far different
Unlike WaaS, Silk is permissionless
It's composable: one wallet can work anywhere, whereas WaaS wallets are specific to a dApp and can't be used elsewhere
Silk can be recovered without centralized backups or requiring the user to elect social guardians
Silk is free and will pay you to onboard users
Onboarding vs. Security and Decentralization
A number of projects have taken impressive strides toward better wallet UX without browser extensions or app downloads. However, there are concerning security and decentralization issues in the current state of these onboarding-focused wallets. These issues have prevented projects serious about decentralization and privacy from using such wallets.
Silk is not another WaaS -- it was built as the solution to WaaS. Silk decentralizes and removes trust from the WaaS stack. It also mitigates phishing, wallet drainers, clickjacking and even malware that not only WaaS but even browser extensions are vulnerable to.
Silk is a new category of wallet. With easy onboarding and without needing a download, it has the UI of a web account or WaaS. Yet it does not make the security, recovery, and centralization sacrifices inherent in the current tooling. We believe that if threshold MPC and AA are done naïvely (as they often are), it simply adds a decentralized attack vector on top of an already-centralized authentication method. However, if threshold cryptography networks and smart contract wallets are assembled in a certain architecture, they can add security and mitigate centralization.
Security -> UX, a Virtuous Cycle
Silk's UI is akin to WaaS but with one key improvement: Silk's UI is composable across dApps like a standard wallet, whereas WaaS are relegated to one dApp. This is only possible becuase of the security model which protects dApps from gaining unauthorized access to the wallet. And with an easy-to-use UX with transaction risk simulation, security is improved as well, in a virtuous cycle.
Good security enables better UX through composability. Good UX makes secure behavior simple.
Easy Developer Experience
Silk is free / permissionless with a web3-native business model rather than SaaS fees. This makes Silk simpler for developers to integrate in a few lines of code (see Quickstart) without onboarding to a billing and dashboard system.
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