Keyless blockchain accounts from zero-knowledge proofs

Blockchain accounts are secured via secret keys, which has led to billions of dollars in lost or stolen assets. Secret keys have three main drawbacks: first, storing a high-entropy key is cumbersome, so users often skip it; second, even stored keys can be lost; and third, both novices and experts can accidentally reveal their key (e.g., through phishing or copy-paste errors). 

To address these issues, we propose a Keyless approach that requires only (1) a traditional Web2 account (e.g., Google or Apple) and (2) a privacy guardian that conceals your Web2 identity on-chain. Unlike multi-party computation wallet solutions which introduce additional trust assumptions, our method co-opts existing digital signatures from Web2 providers as transaction signatures and, importantly, maintains privacy by encapsulating these signatures in a zero-knowledge proof. 

Put simply, Keyless makes “your blockchain account = your Google account," which means onboarding is as simple as signing in with Google, and losing or compromising an account becomes far less likely.