What is Silk?

✨ Introducing a collection of cryptographic protocols that allow a silky smooth login for self-custodial authentication

An account and so much more...

The first point of contact with an application is the most critical for whether users actually stick with the app. Users must trust your service to create an account that will remember who they are and grants access to the services they seek. It is well-known that users quit in droves if they are asked to do much more than say who they are and set a password to secure their account.

Silk provides a familiar experience to users: Standard web2 in the front, non-custodial with cutting edge MPC cryptography tucked away in the back.

In Math We Trust

Silk streamlines onboarding with a trust-minimized protocol for generating cryptographic keys derived from a user's email address and password secured by multi-factor proofs of their identity.

With their key, users can interact with any cryptographic protocol or blockchain application through a simple and intuitive interface. Shards of the key are created on log-in via threshold cryptography with O(1) lightning speed, removing single points of failure and maintaining high standards for production performance. However, use of threshold cryptography is not done naïvely - there are backup security mechanisms in case a threshold of nodes are corrupted in a 51%-like attack.

Silk works in-browser as an embeddable iframe on mobile or desktop, compatible with any dApp. You can embed smart contract interactions via Silk on any website.

Secure Seamless Keys for the Open Internet

Silk requires no downloads, installations or extensions. Sign in on a web-browser to begin using an application and continue your journey on mobile. Cross-device compatibility has never been this smooth for Web3 wallets.

Unlock the Decentralized Web

Silk is engineered as an embeddable iframe with a minimalistic UI that emphasizes security, user consent & control, low cognitive burden, and simplicity at every point. Because Silk is an account that serves as a crypto wallet, users can take their account with them across applications. Any app can utilize public cryptographic infrastructure for signing messages, verifying data, authenticating identity, and making digital payments using cryptocurrencies or ERC20 tokens.

Connect to any dApp with a simple and secure email login.

Convert fiat to stablecoins or crypto easily with no or minimal KYC

Quickly send payments to known and verified contacts

Silk is still in alpha and pending an external security audit. The claims below are based on benchmarks and comparisons to current best practices in wallet security.

Hyper-Scalability

Silk utilizes special cryptographic primitives to maximize security with unlimited parallelizable scalability. User key shards can be reconstructed within 20ms and minimal compute overhead. This allows us to offer sustainable and cost-effective wallet generation that can easily meet demand spikes of 10s of thousands of users all accessing the service at the same time.

Best in-class security and recovery

Silk is engineered to balance the security of a cold wallet with the flexibility of a hot wallet without any significant compromises to safety or UX. Silk pushes the envelope of what is possible with a software wallet via novel cryptographic primitives based on multi-party computation, zero knowledge proofs, and multi-factor authentication.

Private key recovery is a key missing feature for non-custodial software wallets. Silk introduces multi-factor non-custodial wallet recovery, a.k.a. "antisocial recovery" which provides all the benefits of social recovery but with no setup process and enterprise-level security.

Need to see the math? 📩 Email us at [e-mail] to request an early proof of our white paper or join our telegram group to ping the community with your questions

Silk is a strong foundation for the Web

Silk is not limited to blockchain-based use cases. We built Silk simply to make public key infrastructure (PKI) easier and more accessible. Easier PKI is needed for end-to-end encryption and web3, which are plagued by questions such as:

◘ How to be available to the "normies" who won't download a wallet or can't be trusted to store a private key?

◘ How to support wallet recovery without sacrificing security or making users do extra work?

◘ How to sync data and enable logins across multiple devices?

◘ How to securely send confidential messages between two parties without a trusted intermediary ◘ How to trust-lessly verify cryptographic handshakes between nodes in a virtual network

◘ How to sync data and enable logins across multiple devices?