JANUS
For the Build-a-Bull Hackathon submission in the Interoperability circuit we, team Codelab, propose Janus. A solution that faces one of the main concerns in the cross-chain space, User Experience. How do we solve it? CrossChain Account Abstraction.
But let’s understand what the problem is in particular. When dApps want to onboard new users outside of their own ecosystem, they face a big problem, which leads to the loss of potentially new users. These have to not only venture outside of their usual blockchain of use, but they can’t interact with the interested dApps unless they first go through multiple steps which take away time and attention from the dApps. Firstly they need to research Algorand wallets, find which one suits them the best and if it’s reliable, then they need to take care of a new keypair to store safely the mnemonics, and lastly they have to fund the new account by either going through different hops with exchanges or work with a bridge which they also need to look into how to use and what to expect.
All these steps turn the attention away from the app, which needs to advertise Algorand onboarding even before advertising their own service.
Janus aims to solve this UX problem by providing a one step solution to easily integrate in Algorand dApps.
By using Logic Signatures we’re able to create accounts managed by a TEAL. The TEAL will check the signature signed by the user's favorite wallet. The signature is the transaction’s ID, this way a random ID is given to the user as a challenge to prove his authenticity as the owner of the public key inscribed in the Logic Signature, if he signs TxID correctly we can assume he’s the owner of the account, this way allowing the user to effectively transact on Algorand without creating a new key pair or leave his wallet of choice.
Secondly leveraging Wormhole connect we aim to facilitate on ramping funds to the account. The goal is to reduce every interaction to the minimum while keeping the user inside the dApp he wants to use!
For the Hackathon in the month of work we researched Metamask and Phantom documentation to integrate them on Algorand. In the github repository you can find a demo that demonstrates the work of the logic signature and also the relative documentation on our studies going over the hiccups and challenges along the way.
