Committee Grant #010 - Silent Shard by Silence Laboratories

Full Grant Size $35,000

Company Silent Laboratories

Champion: Alex Jupiter

What is a short one sentence description of your Snap idea?

Enabling any Web Service to safely use threshold signatures through MetaMask Snaps - The Silent Snap Shard

What category do you think your Snap idea falls under? You can select more than one. Accounts and Key Management

What specific user problem is your Snap trying to solve?

Our Snap Shard aims to remove single points of failures of dependencies on private keys and seed phrases i.e. in current designs private keys are stored in a single location, the local browser storage. Users have been losing access to wallets’ accounts and associated services due to phishing scams and private key theft through this attack vector for years. This has resulted in a loss of approximately USD $14 billion in 2021 alone, a blot in the face of self-sovereign non-custodial wallets which is one of the core tenets of crypto. The Silent Snap Shard aims to remove this entirely with our AuthSec module.

How will your Snap work from a user's perspective? This is your chance to describe your Snap's user journey and provide any links to designs and related resources.

Welcome to Snap based Multi-Party Distributed Authentication (MPDAuth): Your Silent friend, in our Silent Shard: Using Snap, allows us to prove how Multi-Party Computation-based signature schemes can be built at the core of wallets like MetaMask. Users will be able to get access to any WebApps using MetaMask as one shard node wherein Snap provides a way to extend MetaMask’s functionality- provide DAapps with JSON-RPC API methods for MPC. Essentially, SilentShard_Snap.js comprises of the core threshold signature functions and WebApps would be provided with functionality to make necessary calls and handling UI elements.

Details also on : https://silencelaboratories.notion.site/Enabling-any-Web-Service-to-safely-use-threshold-signatures-through-MetaMask-Snaps-The-Silent-Snap-6639f96c437b4386be60627c0cf24970

Do you foresee any technical challenges in the creation of your Snap? If so, please describe them here.

We understand the sandboxing-based design of the Snap might need further contextualization of the exact functions and libraries developed by Silence Laboratories. But we will figure them out with close communication with the Snap Team (which we have been doing).

Who will be working on creating your Snap? Please provide names of team members, % time commitment to the project, and external links to GitHub/LinkedIn profiles.

The core applied cryptography and engineering team of Silence Laboratories would be working on this project.

1. Design and Concept:

2. Jay Prakash https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayprakashiitbhu/ [30% of the time]

3. Andrei Bytes Globally ranked in top 10 in CTF [30% of the time]

4. Siddhant Shrivastava https://sidcode.github.io/ [30% of the time]

5. Software Architecture and Development:

6. Vladyslav Khomenko, Head of Engineering [80% of the time] and

7. Rohit Agarwal, Lead Security Engineer https://www.linkedin.com/in/rohit-agarwal-26686a17a/ [100% of the time]

8. Product and Market Strategy:

9. Schwarze Katze 9+ years in Web2, 3+ years in Web3 L1 and dApps [30% of the time]

Does your team have a company website or similar? If so, please provide that link here. https://silencelaboratories.com/

How long do you think it'll take to create your Snap? 1 to 2 months

What value of grant are you looking to receive? $35,000 ($15,000 + $20,000 for audit)

Do you agree that you'll open source all code produced as a result of a successful grant application? Yes

What specific software license do you intend to publish your Snap under? Same as provided by MetaMask: https://github.com/MetaMask/metamask-extension/blob/develop/LICENSE

How do you plan on maintaining your Snap after its first publication?

We will follow a hybrid path:

1. Our initial business model will be based on freemium model, API pricing after the first few 1,000 free usage-per-service.92
2. We will also undertake some custom or enterprise development and reapply for a grant to increase features, as needed since we believe a one-size-fits-all in a market like CyberSec is not realistic.

Any other comments? We love the concept of Snap and whole team at Silence Laboratories see this as a great anchor to design functionalities to help add enhanced security and trust features in the wallets. This is just the beginning and we will contribute a lot more ahead, also taking part in SIPs particularly in the key management SIP2 of Snap.