Privy Delegated Actions & Autopilot
Delegated actions are the future --> here's why we're using them for Autopilot.
Axal’s first product on its journey to creating a network of agents for all online tasks is a trading bot, Autopilot.
We wrote a much larger post about Autopilot here, but thought we’d remind you that our $5k competition for creating the best trading agent on our beta testing platform is still live!
In order for Autopilot to exist, we need to make it easy for people to create a wallet to actually join.
This is where Privy comes in.
Privy is a Web3 on-boarding solution that allows for people to create a wallet in a seamless way.
Keep in mind, one of the most ardent problems in crypto at this moment is the fragmentation that exists between different blockchains. This makes it kind of hard to do pretty much anything.
Couple that with our product Autopilot —> where users set up their trading parameters and agents execute actions (like auto-rebalancing, yield harvesting, stop-losses, and more) for them autonomously.
WHY DELEGATED ACTIONS ARE THE FUTURE OF WEB3
Delegated actions allow users to approve the app owner to perform actions for them.
Autopilot can set specific finegrained permissions for the actions the user authorizes - like not spending more than $5 worth of tokens on Base, or to only allow transfers to members belonging to an allowlist. You can find the list of permissions Privy plans to integrate with their app here.
The best part is, this is just the beginning for these kinds of limitations, with much more involved approaches being proposed! Our favorites of those are pre-approving transactions for particular time periods, and linking on-chain oracles to these actions.
The way these delegations work is through Shamir's Secret Sharing (SSS), in conjunction with executing actions on Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Shamir’s secret sharing is an algorithm to split Private keys among trusted actors, such that all of them are required in order to reconstitute and use the key. Trusted Execution Environments generate these sharded keys and are able to use the user’s part of the key only when the app’s codebase sends an authenticated request, after which the user’s part of the key can be decoded and used to sign the requested transaction.
Most importantly, only the TEE can decrypt the User’s part of the key, and hence is the only place where the signature can take place.
You can read more here.
WHAT SETS THIS APART?
Privy's existing integration with providers like ZeroDev provides a unique approach to account abstraction by combining Privy's embedded wallet infrastructure with ZeroDev's Kernel smart account framework.
This allows developers to create programmable wallets with granular permissions through a composable plugin system.
Instead of just basic smart contract wallets, developers can define specific policies (when), signers (who), and actions (what) to create sophisticated permission structures.
For example, you can create session keys that only allow specific contract interactions, set gas limits, or restrict operations to certain time windows - all while maintaining the security of the underlying wallet.
Delegated actions take this one step further by firstly supporting Solana networks, and also supporting delegated actions on smart account actions. This means developers can create sophisticated permission structures that work across both EVM and Solana chains, allowing for consistent wallet functionality regardless of the underlying blockchain.
The delegated action system enables applications to perform authorized operations without needing to store private keys or require active user interaction for each transaction, streamlining the user experience while maintaining security through policy-based permissions.
WHY DOES IT MATTER
One of the most important parts of autopilot is having things on “autopilot.”
In order to do that, we use delegated actions to have agents on behalf of users based on the parameters they have set up.
But more than just being useful, Privy wallets make things frictionless.
Through using the Privy wallet, Autopilot is able to ensure that the UX experience for users is smooth.
Signing up is as simple as connecting either you crypto wallet or using social media/your email
Curious to see how Axal used Privy for Autopilot?
Join our beta testing, live here: https://autopilot.getaxal.com/origin
Credit to Devansh Purohit, the lead engineer at Axal, who co-wrote this piece.