Embedded Accounts Open Beta

Today we’re excited to release the open beta of Embedded Accounts, the easiest way to onboard users to web3 with invisible authentication and transaction flows presented natively in your app.

With Embedded Accounts you can generate powerful smart accounts (ERC-4337) or simple EOAs to build the ideal UX for your use case. Accounts come packed with features like:

• web2 authentication with email, passkeys (biometrics), and soon social login

• account recovery via email (offchain) or onchain guardians

• batch transactions

• gas sponsorship

• session keys

• modularity through ERC-6900 plugins

…and so much more. Read on to learn more or start building in the Open Beta today!

Onboarding the world to web3

Our mission at Alchemy is to onboard the whole world to self-sovereign web3 accounts. To achieve this mission, wallets must become invisible by abstracting away the tech such that the user doesn’t even know they’re using a wallet. We need to transition from wallets to web3 accounts.

The first layer to abstract is the authentication flow. Embedded Accounts enable user-friendly login methods with email, passkeys, and social login (coming soon) to a non-custodial wallet. 

The second layer to abstract is the transaction flow. Embedded Accounts make transactions invisible through account abstraction: send gasless transactions with the Gas Manager, batch transactions like approve+swap, and enforce spending limits with onchain session keys.

Most embedded wallets only abstract the first layer, leaving users to deal with UX problems in the transaction flow like insufficient gas errors, frequent signature requests, or private key export.

Embedded Accounts abstract both layers with ERC-4337 smart accounts to make the entire wallet experience invisible. It also provides first-class support for externally owned accounts (EOAs) because we know the transition from EOAs to smart accounts will be progressive.

Try it at the 3LAU show at ETHDenver 

Embedded Accounts debut tomorrow at ETHDenver for a night of music with performances by 3LAU, Coopahtroopa, and more. Fans will be able to scan their wristband to claim an NFT using only their Face ID or fingerprint.

Here’s what’s happening under the hood:

1. The Royal app generates a passkey on-device

2. A crypto private key is generated inside Turnkey’s secure infrastructure

3. A counterfactual smart account address is generated

4. Royal airdrops an NFT to the smart account

5. Later when the user sends their first transaction, the smart account is silently deployed in a single batched transaction

The end result: music fans receive an attendance token onchain without seeing any seed phrases, gas, or passwords. A truly invisible wallet.

Best of both worlds: smart accounts and EOAs

You can easily configure Embedded Accounts as either an EOA account or a smart account. Royal used Modular Accounts to fully abstract the user experience, but you can choose the right option for your unique use case:

• Modular Account: powerful smart accounts with session keys, onchain recovery, and endless customization with ERC-6900 plugins.

• Light Account: a simple smart account that supports ERC-4337 gas sponsorship and batch transactions.

• EOA: a traditional EOA with web2 login, email account recovery, and private key export

Here’s the full feature breakdown:

Whether you choose smart accounts or EOAs, Account Kit provides all the tools you need to build world-class embedded wallets with Embedded Accounts. As account abstraction continues taking off, we’ll be building more features for both EOAs and smart accounts to elevate the web3 experience.

Familiar login methods: email, passkeys, and social

Craft user-friendly signup flows with email, passkeys, and (soon) social auth. Embedded Accounts are non-custodial and securely store crypto private keys in an encrypted manner with Turnkey. This means your users are always in control, but benefit from a web2-style onboarding experience.

UI components are also coming soon! If you’re interested in UI components, please reach out and say hello. We’d be thrilled to chat.

Zero friction transactions: gas sponsorship and batching

Simple login is a great first step, but now we need to help the user send their first transaction. This is the single biggest point of dropoff in most dapps because the user must deposit funds from an exchange or purchase through a fiat onramp.

With smart accounts, you can skip all those steps and instantly convert every user to your magic moment. Make gas fees disappear by sponsoring gas with the Gas Manager. Streamline multi-step actions (e.g. approve + swap) into a single click by batching transactions in an atomic user operation.

At this point, you may be wondering when this smart contract account will be deployed. This step is also completely invisible! You can defer the deployment until the moment when the user submits their first transaction and then submit both the deployment and the user transaction in a single atomic operation. This is called lazy deployment and it leverages counterfactual addresses, gas sponsorship, and batched transactions to radically simplify smart account onboarding.

Account recovery: onchain or offchain

Another painful part about wallet onboarding was seed phrase backup. Alchemy's embedded wallet solution provides three options for account recovery so you never have to worry about that again, unless the user wants to back up a copy.

1. Email recovery: the user can recover their account via email using the email address they connected to their account. 

2. Onchain recovery: when using a Modular Account, you can add a recovery address on the smart account such as another passkey, a Metamask wallet, or a Ledger. If you lose access to your primary owner, you can recover the account with that address. You can also write your own ERC-6900 recovery plugin with custom features like social recovery or timelocks.

3. Export recovery phrase: and of course, the user may export their recovery phrase at any time and back it up the old fashioned way.

Session keys

Session keys are a powerful new primitive to grant specific permissions to another party (e.g. an app or an automation bot) to conduct certain actions on behalf of the account under preset rules. These rules are enforced onchain by a Session Key plugin on the user’s smart account.

Check out our demo game Worth of Words that leverages session keys to enable a transaction-less experience. Users sign in once to initiate a new game and then safely enable the browser to sign scoped transactions on their behalf during gameplay without additional transaction prompts.

And that’s just one potential use case for session keys. You can also use them for subscription payments, automated trading bots, automated liquidity management, and more. We can’t wait to see what you build with this new lego block!

Extensible with ERC-6900 plugins

If all those features weren’t enough, you can add your own custom smart account features by writing or installing an ERC-6900 plugin. This ERC defines a standard interface for plugins to enable composable modular smart contract accounts. Plugins make it possible to customize smart account behavior in myriad ways including onchain passkey validation, multisignature schemes, timelocks, NFT royalties, and more. 

The ERC-6900 community is actively developing new plugins and we’ll have more to share here soon. Start building today and join the conversation in the Modular Account Standards telegram!

Under the hood

Embedded Accounts are built on Account Kit – a powerful toolkit that handles all the complexity so you (and your users) don’t have to. Let’s unpack it.

AA-SDK

You’ll interface with the AA-SDK – a simple yet powerful library to integrate, deploy, and use smart accounts. It orchestrates everything under the hood to make development easy.

Key management powered by Turnkey

Whether you’re using a smart account or an EOA, every transaction in crypto starts with a private key. We’ve partnered with Turnkey to enable this holistic experience with non-custodial, secure, and scalable wallet infrastructure. The Turnkey team is security obsessed, and they’ve taken a novel approach to security leveraging secure enclaves. This ensures your end users are always in control of their private keys, while still enjoying user-friendly login with email and passkeys. 

Smart accounts

Onchain your smart accounts are powered by the Modular Account or Light Account. Both are audited, secure contracts that we purpose-built for account abstraction and ERC-4337.

Account Abstraction Infra

Finally, Account Kit leverages our Gas Manager and Bundler to sponsor and submit user operations at massive scale. These are mission critical operations on the write path of your application, so we run this infrastructure alongside Alchemy’s fleet of nodes for unparalleled reliability. 

Plus the whole Alchemy platform

Embedded Accounts also integrate easily with other Alchemy products: webhooks, Token APIs, NFT APIs, subgraphs, and more. Build your app on the most complete web3 development platform.

Bundled pricing included in your Alchemy plan

Embedded Accounts come included with every Alchemy plan, including Free Tier.

Most embedded wallet providers charge a fixed rate per Monthly Active Wallet. That means if a user logs in just once, you pay the full amount.

We believe you should only pay for what you use. That’s why we designed a simple pricing plan to pay on a per-request basis. Every tier includes a fixed number of signatures as part of your plan, and then a simple on-demand rate for extra signatures.

If you’re already an Alchemy customer, all of this functionality is included in your plan starting today. Visit the Alchemy dashboard to start building today.

We’re also offering up to 1 ETH grants on Base, in partnership with the Base team. To apply, tell us what you’re building with smart accounts on Base.

Start building today!

We invite everyone to start building in the Open Beta today. The APIs, SDK, and Docs are all ready to go. We’ll be continuously shipping new features and improvements based on your feedback, so please come chat with us!

• Embedded Accounts

• Quickstart Guide

• API Docs

• Contact Sales