6min chapter

Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠 cover image

Nitya Subramanian, Founder of Capsule

Web3 Galaxy Brain 🌌🧠

CHAPTER

Advantages of K1 Curve and Simplifying On-Chain World

This chapter explores the advantages of using a k1 curve in the DKG and the benefits of having everything living in the smart account. It also discusses the focus of Capsule on EVM chains and its capabilities for adding more devices and supporting key rotation and recovery.

00:00
Speaker 1
Yeah I
Speaker 2
guess you also have a couple other advantages you avoid the R1 verification problem by having it be a k1 curve yo-a in the DKG that's signing and you also um have uh don't have the problems around cross-chain state for adding and removing signers or permissions when everything is living in the smart account if you I don't know change the pass key rotate the key or something uh you need to now go update all of your other contracts and on all the other chains so maybe this also facilitates multi-chain smart accounts. Exactly
Speaker 1
correct yeah you um you said about it I could um I think the beautiful thing about um so much of our our our on-chain systems is that they are based off of a cryptographic primitive and that is of course um public e-cryptography like having ECDSA signatures and the way this is going back to our initial decision um with capsule to to be focused more on the the like before things get to the chain and um and the more often side of it is that we think a lot about ourselves is almost a um a a way to get an ECDSA signature and that can work across chains it can work across different contracts on different chains and overall like the on-chain world has just exploded in complexity there's now more places than ever to transact um more more networks more protocols um and if and if we can do something to simplify what that explosion of opportunity looks like to end users um that's that's kind of the approach that we're hoping to take and even from the developer experience like reducing the friction to switch networks things like that are all all things that we um we think are really important yeah I
Speaker 2
didn't really ask but I assume capsules EVM focused or do you imagine supporting other chains as well
Speaker 1
yeah we've been um mostly EVM focused for now um there's a couple of other chains that we've um we've explored adding to and more broadly our SDKs work across ECDSA chains so um we have some um some cosmos compatibility as well uh and um yeah are definitely uh kind of depending on interest uh just adding support for more and more ECDSA chains as we can um similarly just trying to make um also smooth smooth the ease of access across uh different ecosystems is something that we think is really important
Speaker 2
I know you have some upcoming announcements so don't want to spoil those but we did cover a little bit this idea of recovery and in even key rotation um maybe you can give the broad strokes of just what capsule supports is it possible to change the past key or add another device that's maybe from a different OS ecosystem it doesn't share a like a cloud keychain solution how do those things come together in the capsule
Speaker 1
package oh great question so um across so so we use past keys um to authenticate individual devices users can always add more devices if they want to um so that's some things that uh where we're definitely uh we support today um we'll support at launch um as as you mentioned um we have an announcement coming up uh in in November around this um but yeah we're we're definitely uh we're definitely multi-device compatible out of the box um and then uh key rotation and recoveries I think are really cool on where uh there's actually there's been a lot of discussion um in in the space around kind of how MPC and account abstraction and like different structures enable different types of recovery key rotation refreshes um so maybe just like to give give that overview um yeah so um smart contract walls and a kind of abstraction um multi-sakes as well um all fall in this category of having multiple different signers that um sign uh on a smart contract and so in those schemes let's say that uh you have one um one signer that let's say it's a social recovery contact and um my uh my roommate um was one of the the signers uh let's say we're not roommates anymore and I don't want her to be a signer I can take her off and and put someone else on um and that's kind of what um people tend to talk about a lot with with key rotation um MPC is a little bit different where um MPC instead relies on uh relies on forums so let's say um when you first kind of instantiate an MPC scheme you maybe have a two of three uh setup uh in our case two of two but um you that you can always generate a new kind of two of two set or a new two three set um assuming that the MPC scheme supports key refreshes which not all do but many do um but the the difference here is that you can do a refresh which is basically the same as saying um we're gonna have a a new set of um of keys that uh that can sign on this protocol um but you can't say like this one specific signer um can no longer produce a valid signature with some other set and so you you basically are generating parallel sets and there was there's definitely been some criticism of this um in in terms of the the account recovery context I think there's a lot of gray area in here and so while while MPC does require um does have this property there is also um a kind of critical point that I think people miss in the nuance here where depending on the MPC scheme so in our case um it's a two of two system um the user actually still has uh control of both shares and so in a in an environment where there is some amount of trust in in that quorum so let's say it's not my my friend who might no longer be my friend or something like that but it's my device um you can pretty pretty strongly get the same guarantees there um so that's kind of how we we think about the differences between the two
Speaker 2
so

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