Research Post: Sequence Wallet

Wallet is the entrance of web3 world.

Sequence Wallet is a user-friendly, non-custodial, multi-chain smart contract wallet with social/email login for EVM ecosystem, which allows user to choose which token or whom to pay for the gas fee.

Ecosystem/chain spported

Sequence wallet is designed to connect to all of Ethereum and EVM ecosystem. Currently It supports deployment on Ethereum, Optimism, BSC, Polygon, Arbitrum One, Arbitrum Nova, Avalanche.

Target customer

Sequence wallet is beginner-friendly, lowering the barrier to entry for new users. The team have carefully designed the wallet for simple on-boarding. No extensions or installations are needed. No Mnemonic Phrase are needed.

Its target customers are those who want to experience the web3 games or dapps conveniently and do not have large crypto assets to manage.

UI/UX

The UI is concise and clear, highlighting the core functions. The interaction is in line with user intuition. However, it is not sure whether the product has timely and comprehensively informed users of the risk of fraud, which happens mostly on beginners.

Technical architecture

AA(contract level) + MPC(2/3)

EIP-4337 wins the race to implement account abstraction in a contract rather than layer0. It allows the wallets to implement arbitrary logic within the bounds of what’s supported by the underlying virtual machine. Because of this, these contracts can implement functionality that’s not available for EOAs, and can also be upgraded if they are prepared to do so.

Sequence Wallet created with social logins are currently secured using three private keys: Session keys(stored in IndexedDB), a Guard key(owned by Horizon) and a Torus key(generated by Torus Network). At least two of the three keys are needed to unlock an account.

Users can create a Sequence wallet without having to use an email address or social login, which called web3 login. If this path was chosen, users’ wallets would only be controlled by session keys stored on their devices and a backup key.

Founder’s background

Sequence is a product created by the Horizon team. Peter Kieltyka, Co-founder and CEO, is a key contributor to the Ethereum ecosystem and many open source stacks and libraries. The founding team has been deeply involved in the industry for many years, and has profound industry experience in software and game development.

VC funding

Horizon Blockchain Games Closes $40 Million in Series A Funding in Round Led by Brevan Howard Digital and Morgan Creek Digital at October 04, 2022.

Horizon Will Use Funds to Expand Sequence Web3 Developer Platform and Smart Wallet, Scale Already Popular Game Skyweaver, and Introduce SFT Marketplace Niftyswap.

Features

• Interact with dapps and sign transactions directly from the app. No extensions or installations are needed.

• Allows users to pay with any crypto, not just chain’s native currency.

• Social/email login

• View collectibles (NFT, SFT) in wallet

• Grant paying network gas in tokens for the users

• Fiat-to-Crypto onramps integrations

• Easily connect Unreal or Unity games without any blockchain or web3 experience

Depth of integration into specific verticals, dapp support, and WalletConnect

Magic Eden, leading NFT platform Feb 11, 2023

Sunflower Land, farm-based RPG simulator Jan 14, 2023

BoomLand, blockchain games Dec 23, 2023

Skyweaver has the best intergration with Sequence wallet since they are both created by the Horizon team. Actually, it is during the development of Skyweaver that Horizon team sets out to build a wallet that provides the most friendly user experience for all Ethereum chains.

Sequence already supports connecting to dapps via WalletConnect . If your dapp already supports WalletConnect, and you don’t need Sequence-specific functionality, nothing more needs to be done. However, there are some bugs found during my experience.

Adoption stats

According to sequence.xyz, there are 700k+ wallets created, 8M+ transactions and 7 networks supported as of Jan 18th 2023.

Sequence also develops a browser extension, which has only been downloaded in Google store for 725 times in my view.

Gas fee

On Ethereum, deploying a wallet acquires 270k gwei(about $15 these days), which needs to be paid by users. On all other chains supported now, the deploying gas fee is paid by Sequence.

Delay

Social/email login require authorizing from third party, the login delay is relatively high, about 20–30s. Interacting with dapps using wallet connect requires scaning a QR code thus more complicated and time consuming compared with browser extension wallet like metamask.

Switch device

Social/email login is far easier considering there is no need to type Mnemonic Phrase.

Security

Although the docs says that at least two of the three keys are needed to unlock an account, in fact one can login an account through only torus(social/email login). Your account is compromised if your social/email is compromised.

Non-custodial

Apart from the session keys stored in IndexedDB in the user’s browser, the others, Gaued Key and Torus Key are not controlled by the user. So the non-custodial metric is not so good for Sequence. However, we can look forward to the web3 login which gives total control to users this year.

References:

note: The original article is published on Medium. The writer is same.