Yield Seeker now uses Smart Accounts
We've removed gas and improved security
TLDR:
Yield Seeker has been upgraded to use smart accounts, this is a significant backend improvement that’s really levelled up the platform.
With smart accounts we now pay for user gas simplifying the UX, and we make use of Coinbase’s billion-dollar security infrastructure for storing private keys.
We decided to use Coinbase’s smart accounts as they were one of the best options available and strongly tie with our current focus on Base.
We are continually upgrading Yield Seeker and are excited about all the progress we’ve made so far!
Yield Seeker’s recently had a couple of significant upgrades that I wanted to write about this week.
Both of these upgrades are due to us implementing smart accounts, so this post doubles up as some real educational information on what smart accounts allow for.
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Watch the Video version of this Post
Yield Seeker
Yield Seeker is our AI Agent focused on generating yield on your stablecoins on autopilot! I’ve written a few times about it before with the largest post being this one below.
Plus I wrote about our Yield Seeker partner projects intiative that we kicked off, where we originally added both Acolyt and ZenAcademy as partners, and just this week we added Milk Road as a new partner too!
In the last 2-3 months we’ve already had a great start with Yield Seeker with lots of feedback and development. I’ve personally been on calls with 50+ individual users and we’ve learned a lot and continually improved the product and agent.
We’re always thinking of ways to make Yield Seeker better for our users, and recently we released a couple of significant upgrades that make it both easier and more secure to use Yield Seeker than ever before that I’ll detail below.
Gas costs & Security concerns
Up until now once you’ve created your own agent within the Yield Seeker platform you had to send both ETH and USDC into it.
You would send USDC for the agent to grow and use on your behalf, but you’d also need to send in ETH for it to pay for the gas cost of your transactions.
Obviously this made for a less than ideal experience because users had to send in two different currencies and on my calls I’d often see people struggling around to find the right ETH on the right chain to do all this.
Moreover, in our current architecture we had direct control of the private keys, which was always a security concern for us and was one of the reasons we’d generally not recommended people putting too much money into their agents up until now.
Obviously we wanted to improve both of these things to make the user experience both slicker and more secure, so we turned to smart accounts!
Smart Accounts
Smart Accounts (aka account abstraction) was introduced to Ethereum in ERC-4337 and allowed Ethereum accounts to operate similarly to smart contracts.
Since smart accounts are comparable to smart contracts they are able to do far more complex things than normal accounts, for example they can provide more flexible key management, multi-signature support, enhanced security, and also abstract away gas payments.
The creation of account abstraction led to a few companies creating their own implementations and providing paid wallet infrastructure for other people to unlock all these useful features. The main players here are:
Privy - recently bought by Stripe, a big player in wallet infrastructure
Coinbase - their “coinbase developer platform” provide a wallet API
Turnkey - similar to Privy, provide their own wallet API and infrastructure
Alchemy - complete Web3 development toolkit including wallet API
Based on our own analysis on price and combined with the fact that we’re already pretty deep in the Coinbase ecosystem since we’re predominantly on Base right now, out of the choices above we decided to go with Coinbase’s offering.
We’ve since implemented this in our own specific way in Yield Seeker, with it being implemented for each individual user’s agent, and thanks to this we’ve been able to get a couple of major benefits.
Gas
With smart accounts now impelmented we’ve been able to set up our own “Paymaster”, which means that we can now pay for the gas for each individual agent from a single wallet.
As I explained above, previously all users were required to send ETH into their agent’s wallet for the agent to be able to transact on their behalf. However with this new setup we remove the need for users to send in gas as our single paymaster account pays the gas fees for all the transactions on the platform.
This moves the onus of paying gas to us but most importantly makes the entire UX much simpler for users as they now just need to send USDC into their agent!
As you can see above the new wallet page just shows the user USDC, we no longer requeset users to send in ETH any more.
Note that all users who previously sent ETH into their agent have had that ETH directly converted into USDC on their behalf so they don’t have to take any particular action, it’s all been handled seamlessly so that you’re agent is maximising yield for you!
Security
A second and important upgrade from using Coinbase’s smart accounts is that we no longer hold the keys for agent wallets, now instead all the agent keys are with Coinbase in their own “Trusted Execution Environment” (TEE).
In their own words this is a “highly isolated compute environment that is used for sensitive cryptographic operations such as private key generation and transaction signing”.
So essentially the private keys are now held by Coinbase who spend billions on their own security, meaning our users get the benefit of their billion-dollar security!
Using Coinbase’s solution comes at a cost to us, as we now need to pay $0.005 per wallet operation for our agents. This is a small cost to pay though to ensure that our users get the best security available.
So with the addition of smart accounts we’re now paying both the gas costs for our users that goes to the Base network validators and we’re paying Coinbase for security - in return we provide our users with an improved user-experience and improved security guarantees.
Upgrades
We’re honestly really excited about these upgrades and we’ve already seen some great feedback on both with initial testing. I’m personally really pleased with how the Yield Seeker platform’s evolving and we’re constantly making improvements.
Thanks to these upgrades and the upgraded security it affords we’re also putting more of our own money into Yield Seeker and recommend people put more in themselves!
As I mentioned at the start we’ve also previously partnered up with Zen Academy and Acolyt, and this week we kicked off a partnership with Milk Road where the first 100 users to put over $100 into Yield Seeker who are refered by “milkroad” will get an additional 10,000 points bonus on the leaderboard.
If you’re not a Milk Road reader then make sure to check them out to see the latest article they wrote on us and get yourself the bonus.
Finally, this post has undoubtedly taught you about Smart Accounts in a very practical sense and now you know how they are being used with a real example so next time you see someone mention account abstraction or smart accounts you’ll know exactly what they’re talking about!
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