Authereum

A non-custodial wallet that makes Ethereum easier to use

One of the biggest barriers to broader cryptocurrency adoption is user experience. The majority of people using open, global financial products on Ethereum (aka DeFi) today are crypto-natives who don’t mind dealing with the complicated key management and wonky gas payments that come with using non-custodial wallets like Metamask and Ledger. Metamask and Ledger are both good products that many are using, as the explosion of total value locked DeFi in the past year shows. But the wallet UX must improve for adoption to grow beyond crypto-natives.

Custodial services like Coinbase offer users a good UX but aren’t compatible with open, global applications because custodial services are subject to the same regulatory hurdles as traditional financial services. So growing adoption is not just about improving UX — that’s relatively easy. It’s about improving UX while maintaining the property that makes web3 applications unique and useful: censorship-resistance.

Enter Authereum. While the first generation of non-custodial wallets require users to manage their private keys, back up their accounts with a 12-word seed phrase and pay for gas, Authereum represents a new generation of non-custodial wallets that gives users a web2-like email + password experience and eliminates gas payments while maintaining censorship-resistance. It does so by utilizing Ethereum smart contracts — the Authereum wallet itself is a smart contract and private keys are custodied by the smart contract that lives on-chain rather than by a company that stores them on a third-party server

Chris, Shane and Miguel have been working on Authereum for the past 8+months after recognizing the product need while running a smart contract auditing business. A few months ago, we led a $1.1M investment round and today the smart contract wallet is live on the Ethereum mainnet. The team utilized a bunch of new Ethereum building blocks, like ENS, batched transactions, and meta transactions to contribute to an effort that the whole cryptocurrency community is aligned on: bringing more users to the space.

If you’re like me and have enjoyed using non-custodial wallets for years but want to remove the need to click pop-up windows to pay for gas over and over again, you may want to give Authereum a shot. And if you’re a dApp developer going after the billions of Internet users who aren’t yet using cryptocurrencies, check out the Authereum docs.