Our team is building a unified and modular account layer for Web3 that allows upper-layer applications to be used with a seamless Web2 user experience while maintaining security. Hexlink derives self-custodial smart accounts from email and social media accounts that allow users of to receive cryptocurrencies and NFTs without signing up or having any crypto knowledge.
The current user onboarding flow is too long and requires users to have a previous understanding of the new concepts: seed phrase, private key, and address to enter into the web3 space. In the current onboarding flow, new users are introduced to a brand new identity(on-chain address) to access the upper layer applications in a brand new space, which brings huge user friction to the new users. A lot of projects are improving the user experience by removing the seed phrase and enabling social logins to wallets. However, this still follows the old model and introduces a new identity to users in the first place. Why can’t we use our existing identities, ex. emails or phone numbers directly in the web3 space?
Hexlink aims to be the unified pluggable smart account layer for Web3, focusing on both:
What makes Hexlink unique is its approach to allow everyone to reuse their web2 identities in web3. We removes the requirements of understanding new concepts before get into web3. Hexlink allows anyone with and email or phone number to receive crypto without setting up a wallet, signing up for an account, or even any previous knowledge of blockchain. Your web2 identities become your web3 account. With the design of our pluggable account framework, users are able to interact with any upper layer applications easily. For blockchain professionals, they can customize their Hexlink Account by choosing different auth service provider, enabling favorite plugins and so on.
Hexlink aims to unify Wallet and Auth by proposing a unified pluggable smart account layer. Hexlink Account provides better user experience for dApps by supporting email/phone/social login while maintains a unified account layer across dApps. It is easy to be embedded into different dApps including Wallets. In article Demystifying Wallets: A Revolutionary dApp User Flow, we break down the wallet into two parts: Account and Assets Management. Wallet is just a dApp to manage assets owned by the account. After abstracting the account layer out, we see no difference between wallets and other dApps. There are several advantages of Hexlink Account we'd like to emphasize.
Hexlink Accounts are derived from existing identities, such as email, phone number or ENS. In other words, Hexlink gives every email/phone number/ENS user a ready-to-use smart contract account. The mapping from existing identity to wallet address is on-chain so users can use their email addresses and phone numbers as on-chain username to receive cryptos.
Hexlink Account is fully modularized. In default the account is setup with very basic functionalities but users can customize their account by enable different plugins such as auth module and social recovery module.
Hexlink Account support varies auth options such as dAuth, ParticleNetwork and Web3Auth. We abstract different auth solutions as "Auth Provider" which user can config in its account with "Auth Module". Users can switch to different auth provider, or even enable multiple auth providers for multi-factor authentication, by configuring its auth modules. The auth module may contain the metadata explaining how the authentication workflow works. We proposed EIP-6662 to standardize the authentication metadata.