CODEWITHSUNDEEP
blockchainethereumsmartcontractsgnosis-safe
Ostap Volanuk
Ostap Volanuk

Reputation: 31

Is there a way to use multisig without smart contracts on Ethereum?

I have already found many wallets that offer multisig smart contract deployment. But this way is very expensive and slow, because it requires a lot of transactions. I think there is another way. For example, we can create many private keys, sign transactions with them, and then combine the results into one final transaction. Is such a scheme possible? Or maybe I missed some services?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1475

Answers (2)

Max
Max

Reputation: 2230

Currently, Ethereum protocol only supports smart contract based multisignature wallets. They are very expensive to deploy and they do expose wallet setup: participants of multisig wallet, many of them and what is the minimum amount of confirmation to transfer funds from this wallet. On top of that, smart contract should know how to work with native coins, with different kinds of tokens and be able to handle multiple spending requests. This all adds weight to smart contract and makes it more expensive to deploy and operate.

However, there is a threshold signature system (TSS). In the nutshell it works the following way: all participants generate their own private keys, then they derive their respective public keys and share with others. The group public key is literally a sum of participants public keys. When they need to sign a transaction they calculate their individual shares of r and s values of a signature. This way they literally can just sum up their signature shares and get a group signature. This approach is called multiplicative-to-additive transformation and is a scope of multi party computation (MPC).

The advantage of it is that group does not expose their wallet participants to the world and transaction cost is the same as if that was signed by a normal private key (through a Metamask for example). On top of that, there is no difference what transaction you are signing, coin transfer, NFT token minting or deployment of smart contract.

If you want to try this in action feel free to download multichain multisig wallet: WH Cypher. It supports Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, ERC20 tokens, BSC, BEP20 tokens and more. There will be more blockchains supported soon. You can setup there any wallet scheme: 2-of-2, 2-of-3, 3-of-5 and so on. There is also test networks avalable: Bitcoin Testnet and Ethereum Ropsten.

Disclaimer: I am a developer of this wallet. Feel free to reach out to me to provide feedback or request new features.

Upvotes: 1

Mikko Ohtamaa
Mikko Ohtamaa

Reputation: 83656

Ethereum does not support native threshold wallets. You need to use multisignature wallets like Gnosis Safe.

Gnosis Safe requires only one transaction per execution from the multisig wallet. Other communication happens off-chain. Thus your assumption "very expensive and slow, because it requires a lot of transactions." is incorrect.

Upvotes: 1

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