Introducing server wallets
Announcing direct access to Privy's wallet infrastructure via powerful, flexible APIs
Henri Stern
|Dec 17, 2024
Privy builds user onboarding and embedded wallet infrastructure to enable better products built on crypto rails. This means embedding asset control within applications themselves so users, businesses and machines can access digital assets through seamless product experiences.
Today, Privy is opening access to server wallets. They enable application servers to create and manage embedded wallets via API access to Privy’s wallet infrastructure.
Server wallets are a new way to leverage embedded wallets for your application. They are controlled directly from your backend so you can power money movement at scale.
Server wallets are built on the same cryptosystem that enables all Privy embedded wallets today. Where embedded wallets run on user devices by default, server wallets reconstitute keys in secure enclaves controlled by the rightful wallet owner (registered at wallet creation time). The wallets only ever exist point-in-time for signing within the secure enclave, and key splitting ensures flexible recovery systems for all use cases.
Building on our experience serving millions of users, server wallets bring together enterprise-grade security and consumer-grade performance to give developers access to secure, granular controls to manage wallets with or without users in the loop.
We’re excited to bring this new tool to your arsenal. Check out our server wallet docs and request early access in the Privy dashboard today to get started.
How we got here
Over the last two years, Privy has helped onboard over 30m users to our customers’ apps, enabling easier access to self-custody for everyone, and letting developers grow their market by crafting products that cater to a wider audience.
Across our product suite, the promise is simple: “build for users, not wallets.” Today, thousands of developers use Privy to build powerful flows to onboard more users to their apps. Serving these users across chains and platforms, they have reshaped what building in crypto can mean.
At Privy, we’ve grown to keep up with the builders we serve, powering onchain flows for consumer products—like digital marketplaces, games, social apps—, supporting financial trading products, and providing stablecoin rails to neobanks and payment providers. In so doing, we’ve seen the need for direct API access to secure signing infrastructure.
Introducing Server wallets
Today, we are excited to give developers direct API access to Privy’s lower-level wallet infrastructure.
These server wallets work across all EVM chains as well as Solana and Bitcoin. They come prepackaged with:
Robust transaction controls – Enabling execution of arbitrary transactions, such as transferring funds and arbitrary interactions with smart contracts. Transaction execution is idempotent ensuring the same resubmitted transaction is only processed once in case of a retry.
State sync between your app and the chain — Server wallets can broadcast transactions onchain and register event listeners (via webhooks) on transaction status and incoming funds.
A powerful policy engine – Granular policies let you enforce what actions a wallet can take, set allowlisted contracts or recipients, maximum amounts to be transferred and more.
Approver quorums – Cryptographically enforced chain of custody enables any configuration of m-of-n approving parties to authorize transactions on a wallet.
Server wallets are built on globally distributed infrastructure and operate with <200ms signature times and four 9s of availability.
Who they serve
Opening up these APIs gives developers access to secure, performant wallet infrastructure to power a wide array of use cases directly from their backend.
With this offering, you can now easily:
Manage a secure set of signers for your application using custom logic to power multiple wallets or your own omnibus (app-wide) wallet.
Spin up a fleet of millions of wallets for your product, to manage balances and asset flows for cross-border payments and treasury management across your product lifecycle,
Create shared wallets controlled by a group of collaborators, for social apps where groups trade, invest and interact together with digital assets,
Program wallets to automate onchain actions—like stop loss orders, DCAing, etc— run according to custom logic or by an AI agent.
We’re excited to be working with key partners—neobanks, payments providers and treasury solutions—to power many of these workflows. Here’s a high level overview of server wallets. Request early access in the Privy dashboard.
Let’s build together
These past two years, developers have reshaped what building in crypto means as they craft opinionated products for a wide array of users. Alongside Privy’s embedded wallets, which make it easy to onboard any user to crypto, these server wallets let you spin up a fleet of programmable wallets so you can power money movement at scale.
We are more excited than ever about the potential to build impactful products onchain to create new markets and transform existing ones. This starts with better tooling so you can focus on your product.
Onward.
Team Privy
