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Everything you need to know about Smart Accounts and how to start using and building things with smart accounts. |
A Smart Account is a fully customizable bank account. If you think of your regular bank account or crypto account, it uses key to sign transactions. This means that anyone with the key (password, private key) can sign anything and approve sending money out of your account.
Note: A Smart Account is also known as a Smart Contract Account while the crypto account that uses a key to sign transactions is also known as an Externally Owned Account (EOA) or signing account.
This means that if someone got access to your username and password, they can take all your money. It also means that if you forgot your password, then you have to go through a lengthy password reset process with a regular bank account and if it’s a crypto account, your money is gone forever.\
With a Smart Account, it’s fully customizable, so you can create any type of rule you want. The most common type of rule you can create is a multi-signer account. For example, instead of having just one password (or private key) control your account you can have it done by multiple people. You can add 3 other people (or companies!) that you trust to be signers of your account. Then if you want to send any transactions, at least 2 of them have to approve the transaction.\
Another common rule is to set a spending limit. You can set a limit that allows you to withdraw amounts under $100, without needing approval from everyone else. However, for larger amounts you could require 2 other people to sign and approve the transaction.\
When you change the very idea of an account from something that is simply using a password or private key to approve transactions, to something that is fully customizable from the ground up, the possibilities are endless. This guide will show you some of the possibilities and give you the resources to make those possibilities a reality.
There are three main sections in this guide: Learn, Build, Discover.
- Learn about how Smart Accounts work.
- Build cool things with Smart Accounts.
- Discover what other people are building and using with Smart Accounts
We recommend starting with Learn and seeing some tutorials there to learn more about how Smart Accounts work. Then, head to the Discover section to get some ideas and inspiration for the types of things possible with smart accounts. Then, complete one of the Build tutorials and make an app that uses Smart Accounts.
You can follow the Ecosystem Diagram as an example.\
The Ecosystem Diagram covers a lot of tools. If you want a simpler introduction to Safe, start with the following steps:
- Learn about What is a Smart Account
- Create a Safe using the Web Interface
- Set a Spending Limit in your Safe
- Use a Safe App
- See how others are using Safe
- Learn about Externally Owned Accounts vs Smart Contract Accounts
- Create Safe from the command line using safe-cli
- Create Safe using core-sdk
- Get ideas of what to build from Safe Hackathon Guide and List of Hackathon Winners