At Spaceport, our goal has always been to deliver a top-notch user experience while managing IP licensing and transactions smoothly. Since launching the Spaceport licensing portal over a year ago, we’ve developed innovative solutions to tackle challenges like user onboarding and transaction management. These efforts naturally aligned with the principles of account abstraction, a cutting-edge technology that has since matured in the blockchain ecosystem.

Account abstraction offers a standardized and efficient approach to handling transactions, solving many of the same problems we tackled with our custom-built system. As we strive to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, we are planning to adopt account abstraction to enhance our platform even further. This article explores our journey, the benefits of this transition, and what it means for the future of Spaceport Protocol.

The Current Architecture: A Custom Solution

Initial Challenges

When we set out to build Spaceport Protocol, our goal was to create a robust, user-friendly platform that could handle licensing and transactions seamlessly. We faced several challenges:

User Experience: We wanted to ensure that users could interact with the platform easily, using familiar social logins.
Transaction Management: Handling transactions securely and efficiently was paramount.
Scalability and Reliability: Our system needed to scale to accommodate increasing user activity without compromising on performance.

Our Custom Implementation

To address these challenges, we developed a bespoke architecture:

Frontend: Users connect with their social accounts via Web3Auth, which creates a non-custodial EVM wallet.
On-chain Transactions: A centralized wallet acts as a relayer for user transactions. Users sign messages (EIP-712), and the centralized wallet submits transactions on their behalf, which also removes the need for users to own tokens to pay for gas fees.
Protocol: The system checks that the transaction was initiated by the Spaceport signer and verifies the user's EIP-712 signature.

This solution effectively met our needs at the time, providing a seamless user experience and ensuring transaction integrity. However, as the blockchain ecosystem matured, new solutions emerged that could enhance our system further.

Planning for Account Abstraction: A Standardized Approach

We are now in the planning stages to adopt account abstraction, particularly as implemented in ERC-4337, which offers a standardized way to handle many of the challenges we addressed with our custom solution. Below are the key components of account abstraction and why we use them:

User Operations: These pseudo-transaction objects encapsulate the details of transactions, making it easier to manage and process them.
Bundler: A service that listens to user operations, runs simulations, bundles them, and relays them to the EntryPoint contract.
EntryPoint: An immutable contract that coordinates the verification and execution of user operations.
Paymaster: An entity that can sponsor the gas fees for user operations.
Aggregator: An entity trusted to validate and aggregate signatures, often used to optimize the processing of multiple operations.

Planned Benefits of Account Abstraction

There are four main benefits of utilizing account abstraction for us. Decentralization, Scalability, Flexibility and Security. By utilizing a third-party maintained bundler and relayer infrastructure, we will move away from our centralized signer model towards a decentralized one. This enhances reliability and aligns with industry standards. We increase scalability with the decentralized queue system managed by the bundler and relayer. This can handle higher transaction volumes without the risk of rate limiting, which was a potential issue with our centralized API.

Users also get more flexibility by being able to either log in with social accounts and transact through a relayer and bundler or connect their own wallets, providing a more malleable and user-centric approach. Lastly, with third-party vendors handling verification and execution, the overall security of transactions will be enhanced, reducing the burden on our system to manage these aspects.

Transitioning to Account Abstraction

To integrate account abstraction, we are planning an implementation strategy that makes several key changes. These include:

Backend: Develop a service to manage UserOperation objects and integrate with bundler services. Update our nonce management and transaction tracking systems.
Frontend: Update login and wallet creation flows to initiate transactions using UserOperation objects and provide real-time transaction status updates.
Authentication: Adapt or replace Web3Auth to work with the bundler requirements, ensuring seamless user onboarding and authentication.
Smart Contracts: Update protocol logic to support the new signature verification mechanisms.

Strategic Importance

Adopting account abstraction aligns Spaceport Protocol with the latest industry standards, enhancing our platform's scalability, reliability, and user experience. This planned move not only modernizes our infrastructure but also positions us as a forward-thinking leader in the blockchain space, ready to leverage cutting-edge technologies for the benefit of our users.

The planned shift from a custom-built solution to a standardized account abstraction model marks a significant step towards decentralization of the Spaceport Protocol. By embracing this new technology, we aim to enhance our platform's performance, security, and user satisfaction. As we continue to innovate and adapt, our commitment to providing a robust and user-friendly blockchain experience remains unwavering.

Stay tuned for more updates as we progress through these exciting changes and continue to push the boundaries of what's possible with blockchain technology. For more information contact us here.

Lida Tang is the Co-founder and CTO of Spaceport. He has been founder of multiple B2C and B2B companies while leading development and technical direction. Earlier in his career, Lida launched two billion-dollar gaming franchises –BioShock for Take-Two Interactive and Saints Row for Deep Silver – before starting his mobile app tooling company and co-founding an indie game studio.

Decentralizing Spaceport: Embracing the abstract