The Future of Wallets: MPC vs Smart Wallets by Ivo Georgiev | Devcon Bogotá

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There's undoubtedly more we can do to improve Ethereum wallet UX, and there's two technologies competing for this: MPC (multi-party computation) and smart wallets.
Let's explore the relative strenghts and weaknesses of each, as well as the protocol upgrades that will help (eg account abstractions, EIP3074 and EIP4337) and how those affect the comparsion.
Speaker(s): Ivo Georgiev
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Developer Infrastructure
Keywords: mpc,multi-party computation,ux,smart wallets
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Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
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[@lherfel]

thanks, seems like two methods could be mixed/matched?

[@kylescrypto]

Yes. MPC for the account that owns the AA account

[@MehranHydary]

So MPC can be for wallets or for private keys right?
i.e. ambire does MPC for wallets and fireblocks / dfns does MPC for private keys?

[@ivogeorgiev2904]

Not at all - MPC in this context is a technique to make multiple private key shards sign as if they're one private key.
This can be used both for wallet software and for key management, but it's essentially the same tech.
Ambire doesn't use MPC at all, it uses smart contract accounts which are covered in the talk.

[@Ryan-xq3kl]

psst "developers" when youre working with cryptography sometimes youll have to.... Develeop cryptography?! one of the problems with MPC is that it requires custom cryptography maybe you should not be working with cryptography if you dont know how to implement it? 😂

[@ivogeorgiev2904]

That's an extremely shallow take, any reputable developer of wallet software or even any type of engineer who needs to work with mission-critical stuff will know the importance of minimizing failure points.
Does MetaMask roll their own ECDSA libraries? No. Because they're already built, audited, established and etc.