Next-Gen Smart Account Features – powered by Polkadot

It seems to be a really bad idea to bring shady projects and known liars like Acala on board.

I think could be a great project but should be integrated with the wallets in the ecosystem. Before vote we should confirm if the projects in the ecosystem would use this feature.

Travel and accommodation costs for 9 conferences within 7 to 8 months of work sounds a bit excessive.
Can you walk us through the importance of these. As of now it seems like there will be more than 1 conference per month.

Dear @Interstellar ,

Thank you for your proposal. Our vote on this proposal is NAY.

The Medium Spender track requires a 50% quorum and simple majority according to our voting policy. This proposal has received one aye and six nay votes from ten members, with two members abstaining. Below is a summary of our members' comments:

The referendum faced overwhelming opposition, with members raising concerns about the lack of clear technical details, the large funding request without milestones, and the proposal’s potential redundancy with existing solutions like Nova Wallet and mufi. Critics emphasized the need for a phased approach with smaller milestones and questioned the necessity of certain budget items, such as travel costs for conferences. While one member expressed support for the team’s past contributions, others abstained, citing insufficient detail to fully evaluate feasibility and value. Overall, the proposal was deemed unclear and overambitious.

The full discussion, along with individual members' votes and comments, can be found in our internal voting.

Kind regards,
Permanence DAO

We appreciate the feedback and the opportunity to clarify our proposal.

While Nova Wallet has already simplified user onboarding by replacing seed phrases with (complex) passwords, it shifted the burden of secure storage and memorization from one form (seed phrases) to another (passwords). The upcoming Polkadot App goes a step further by eliminating both seed phrases and passwords. While this is a step into the right direction, it introduces centralized points of failure by relying on Google and Apple logins, undermining resilience and compromising decentralization.

Our value proposition focuses on creating an instant onboarding experience, similar to the Polkadot App, but without undermining resilience or compromising decentralization. Interstellar represents the first decentralized and truly resilient smart account infrastructure for Polkadot and beyond. This framework eliminates the need for traditional recovery methods such as seed phrases, passwords, centralized email/social/Google/Apple logins, or centralized passkeys—replacing them with a more resilient, decentralized, and user-friendly alternative (Decentralized Cloud Backups, NFC Backups Items, and/or Social Recovery) which can easily be integrated within existing wallets. Eliminating the need for complex passwords or centralized Google/Apple accounts.

Additionally, today's Polkadot wallets are exposing user private keys within the (mobile/desktop/browser) device's memory not only during wallet creation but also every time when a transaction is signed. With phishing attacks increasing exponentially, this represents a significant attack vector and huge risk for the whole Polkadot ecosystem.

Our proposed smart account infrastructure does not expose private keys. It does so while keeping the convenience of your daily smartphone device. Eliminating the need for hardware wallets.

Furthermore, this decentralized infrastructure enables sybil-resistance as a feature, unlocking completely novel ways to onboard newcomers into the ecosystem.

Other ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana,... are already increasingly incorporating smart account infrastructures. However, those infrastructures heavily rely on centralized points of failure like email/social/Apple/Google logins, centralized passkeys, centralized authentications, centralized malware detections, centralized transaction confirmations, and more. They also rely on a lot of standalone components like centralized MPC protocols or keystores which operate in separate execution environments.

Interstellar, in contrast, introduces decentralized backups, decentralized authentications, decentralized transaction confirmations, and more decentralized alternatives which are directly incorporated into the blockchain runtime, protected by Polkadot's economic security. This makes our proposed smart account features significantly more resilient and secure than any other existing framework and smart account infrastructure currently available across the whole Web3 ecosystem.

For cybersecurity and applied cryptography experts:

Included within our proposed common good decentralized smart account infrastructure is the first decentralized zero-trust authentication solution (backed by W3F) using Garbled Circuits for OTP and dynamic visual cryptography–based transaction confirmation screen on mobile. This ensures the protection of sensitive data—such as code, transaction messages, and random visual cryptographic shares—through computation privacy, even if the device is compromised. We reinforce this with on-chain decentralized mobile-secure-element/key attestation, enabling instant onboarding. Specifically, the secure element signs the OTP response (the user’s random keypad input) for transaction confirmation, making each interaction tamper-proof. By verifying every transaction in real time, our approach delivers end-to-end protection from device to blockchain and even aligns with PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements and beyond.

To combat phishing and malware, large enterprises and financial institutions often rely on MTD/EDR solutions that can cost over $100 annually per device, yet still leave significant security gaps. Our decentralized approach not only addresses these threats more effectively—especially when phishing and sophisticated threats are amplified by AI—but also does so at a fraction of the cost.

Early Access Partners include:

Acala
Apillon
Braille
Hydration
SubWallet
Xcavate
…

Sorry, but how did you decide on the list for early access?