Overview

Embedded signers are self-custodial wallets provided by Openfort, seamlessly integrated into your application. They don't require a separate wallet client, such as a browser extension or mobile app, and are accessible directly from your product. These wallets are ideal for users who don't have or don't want to connect an external wallet.

Embedded signers#

Embedded signers are sekf-custodial wallets provisioned by Openfort itself for a wallet experience that is directly embedded in your application. Embedded signers do not require a separate wallet client, like a browser extension or a mobile app, and can be accessed directly from your product. These are primarily designed for users of your app who may not already have an external wallet, or don't want to connect their external wallet.

You can choose exactly when to create an embedded signer for your user, and can request signatures and transactions from the wallet using Openfort's native signature and transaction methods, using the wallet's EIP1193 provider, or a library like wagmi or viem.

Smart wallets#

Every Openfort embedded signer has a smart wallet associated.

Smart wallets are programmable, onchain accounts that incorporate the features of account abstraction. With just a few lines of code, you can create smart wallets for your users to sponsor gas payments, send batched transactions, and more.

Under the hood, a smart wallet is an ERC-4337-compatible smart contract deployed onchain. This smart contract can be programmed to support features like transaction batching, gas sponsorship, delegating permissions, and more.

When using a smart wallet, a user's assets are held by the smart contract itself. This smart contract is controlled by an embedded signer (an externally-owned account) secured by Openfort's non-custodial wallet infrastructure. Openfort automatically takes care of creating signers for users and generating smart contract wallets controlled by these signers.

Gas sponsorship#

With smart wallets, your app can pay for gas fees simply by registering policy in the Openfort Dashboard. Openfort will automatically route gas payments from your policye instead of your users' wallets, allowing your users to transact on-chain instantly –– even if they don't have a balance in their smart wallet.

Permissions & session keys#

Openfort works closely with the teams building the next generation of account abstraction standards on top of ERC-4337, such as permissions & session keys (ERC-7715), smart wallet modules (ERC-7579), and smart account discovery (ERC-7555) across different applications. As these standards become ratified, Openfort will incorporate native support for these features.