A3S Protocol

First transferable address for Web3.0. Trade, borrow or escrow your address securely.

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Inspiration

The idea of the project comes down to our personal experience. This is the story of one of our team members who is a quant trader. Their trader team would do some on-chain high-frequency trading activities. One trouble that they had a few times is that every time someone left the team, they will need to retire the whole batch of their on-chain addresses. In order to avoid any moral hazard. Later on, they did come up with a centralized solution to use the AWS service, so the trader doesn’t need to know the private key but still has control over the trading address. The centralized solution does satisfy their needs. But we want to take it to the next level, to bring that solution to the on-chain world.

What it does

A3S Protocol is a multi-chain protocol to build the next generation of address standards, whereby users can mint addresses with no private keys but are controlled by NFTs. To transfer control in a way of transferring NFTs allows users to securely trade, lease and escrow addresses for the first time, as well as makes it possible for the valuable interaction records carried by addresses to continue. A3S equips addresses with liquidity and integrability, enabling them to be priced as the basic on-chain service. We believe that breaking the cocoon that binds the addresses and making addresses transferable will provide them with liquidity and integrability, which leads to many application scenarios that were otherwise difficult to achieve, and can turn addresses from isolated components into a class of services that can be accessed flexibly and easily priced. Some potential use cases:

  1. OTC transaction of Non-transferable on-chain assets and interests that bind to the addresses.
  2. Temporary custody of addresses: temporarily entrust others to operate your address, such as automatic investment, P2E on Gamefi, etc.
  3. Addresses being the new collectibles: trading addresses of celebrities, such as auctioning addresses used by Elon Musk, Stephen Curry, etc. ……

How we built it

We have constructed a set of new address standards and designed the Transferable Address. We create an Address Factory Smart Contract that follows a standard that improves the ERC-721 standard, thereby establishing a standard for contract paradigms and address transfer methods. The protocol allows users to mint an Owner NFT from the Address Factory Smart Contract, which automatically deploys a corresponding Address Smart Contract whose ownership points to the corresponding NFT holder. The Contract Address can receive any type of on-chain assets but only allows the owner to send assets, that is, the Contract Address will serve as the vehicle for users to interact with any other on-chain addresses and DApps. alt text As a result, the user who holds the NFT is holding a remote control to the Address Smart Contract. All subsequent interactions with other addresses and contracts will be completed by the NFT holder to control the Address Smart Contract. Meanwhile, users can transfer their NFTs through the NFT exchange market that supports the ERC-721 or ERC-1155 standard. Since the control of the Address Smart Contract is directed to the NFT, after transferring the NFT, the control of the Address Smart Contract will also be transferred.

Challenges we ran into

During the development of the protocol, we have encountered various challenges and issues, some of which we have resolved, and some of which we are in the process of actively exploring.

1. None of the existing NFT standards can be directly adapted to the A3S protocol

The most widely used NFT standards are ERC-721 and ERC-1155, neither of which can fully meet the needs of A3S Protocol. The NFTs of ERC-721 only record the metadata, which cannot directly realize the binding relationship between NFT and Contract Address’s owner authority. At the same time, the ERC-721 requires a blockchain browser such as ‘Etherscan’ to query the NFT held on the address. Also, the ERC721 standard does not support the bundle transaction of NFT, while the ERC-1155 standard, which can support the bundle transfer of NFT, includes many state variables that are redundant for A3S. This will increase the code in the contract, thus increasing the gas fee for the protocol. We faced the challenge of improving the existing NFT standards.

2. High gas fee for Smart Contract

A3S transferable addresses are contract addresses and the deployment of smart contracts requires a lot of gas fees. The high gas fee may be the biggest obstacle for users to use the product. So, minimizing the gas fee of the A3S Protocol also becomes a challenge.

3. Security issues on multi-chain

An A3S address is a contract address, so it needs to be deployed on the corresponding blockchain before it can be controlled by users. However, it is very natural for users to use the same EOA address on multi-chains, and such a habit will lead users to mistakenly believe that the same contract address on different chains can also be directly controlled by themselves when using A3S Protocol. Thus it may lead to security incidents similar to the one when Optimism cooperated with Wintermute and mistakenly transferred tokens to an undeployed layer2 contract address, ultimately losing control of the assets. So, it is a challenge for us to ensure the security of users’ assets when A3S protocol supports multi-chain in the future.

4. Integration with other protocols

The contract address cannot directly interact with various Dapps or protocols, and requires additional development to integrate different protocols. With so many protocols on chain, it becomes a challenge to integrate other protocols more efficiently and improve the availability and adaptability of A3S addresses.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

So far, we have successfully completed many challenges and achieved some accomplishments that we are proud of.

1. Successfully design and build a great architecture for A3S Protocol

We have successfully built the basic architecture of the A3S protocol and made some improvements to the ERC-721 standard:

  • form a binding relationship between NFT and the contract address’s owner authority;
  • support bundle transferring of NFTs with lower gas fee;
  • support directly querying the NFTs held by the owner

2.Significant reduction in gas fee

We successfully made A3S a significant saving in gas fees compared to similar contract address wallets such as Gnosis Safe, and in this regard, we made many efforts:

  • high abstraction of the contract function to minimize the code size;
  • minimal data structure and high-order mapping relationships to minimize the modification of state variables and further reduce gas fees.

3. A solution that makes multi-chain contract addresses consistent

We introduce the concept of 'salt', which enables the deployment of the same contract address on EVM-compatible chains by using the same salt. Therefore, after a user successfully generates an A3S address, the salt corresponding to the contract address will be shown. Based on the spirit of decentralization, we prompt the user to keep this salt by himself. In the future when A3S supports multi-chains, the user can deploy the same contract address on other chains with this salt, thus ensuring the consistency of multi-chain addresses.

4. Extensive attentions and spontaneous supports before the product launch

Before the launch of the A3S product, we participated in the GR14 grant event and received spontaneous donations from over 1,000 users to support A3S, ranking in the TOP 3% of all projects. Meanwhile, we have over 140k addresses signed up during the close-beta testing phase. We are very proud that the idea of transferable addresses has gained the attention and approval of so many developers and users, and are very encouraged by this.

What we learned

First, we feel the advantages of Polygon. Compared to Ethereum, Polygon's low gas cost can help products like A3S to bring a better experience to users. The various open source protocols also provide a lot of help and convenience for our development. Secondly, we recognize the importance of the community. The A3S protocol is a kind of infrastructure, and integrating A3S addresses with various on-chain protocols also requires the contributions from developers to build the ecosystem together, in addition to relying on some common solutions. Finally, during this period of exploration, we also realized that the significance of transferable addresses may not be limited to the beginning of the story, where we simply wanted to not have to transfer assets to new addresses after a member left the traders team. There may be more use cases for the new generation of address standard built by the A3S Protocol.

  1. OTC transaction of Non-transferable on-chain assets and interests
  2. Temporary escrow of addresses: temporarily entrust others to operate your address, such as automatic investment, P2E on Gamefi, etc.
  3. Packaged assets transactions by addresses transactions
  4. Addresses being the new collectibles: trading addresses of celebrities, such as auctioning addresses used by Elon Musk, Stephen Curry, etc.
  5. ……

What's next for A3S Protocol

Next, A3S plans to support multichain and support users to interact with other on-chain protocols via WalletConnect, thus increasing the use scenarios of transferable addresses and expanding the A3S ecosystem. Then we aim to build a marketplace specifically for A3S addresses. In the future, we also plan to develop a next-generation wallet based on the A3S protocol and develop more functional modules.

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