Circle Launches Programmable Wallets

Tuesday marks the launch of Circle’s public beta for its wallet-as-a-service platform, allowing Web3 developers on Avalanche, Ethereum, and Polygon to embed wallets into their applications.

Circle’s new offering, dubbed Programmable Wallets, consists of a handful of APIs that developers can integrate into their applications to achieve the desired use case more quickly and efficiently than by writing all the necessary code from scratch.

Circle’s white paper explains, “With these APIs, you can specify parameters such as the blockchain network you wish to create the wallet on, custody type, transaction type, and transaction value limits, among others, to generate purpose-built wallets tailored to the use case you’re developing.”

Jeremy Allaire, CEO and co-founder of Circle, stated that Programmable Wallets are part of the stablecoin issuer’s strategy to promote the adoption of digital assets and “public blockchain-based payments.”

Allaire said, “This new platform marks the first step for Circle’s Web3 services as we work to alleviate common pain points for developers, remove friction from value exchange, deliver more seamless user experiences, and promote the adoption of blockchain-powered wallets.”

In late April, Circle entered Web3 by releasing its permissionless cross-chain transfer protocol (CCTP) to Ethereum and Avalanche developers. A burn-and-mint mechanism has made USDC transfers between chains more secure and efficient.

According to its white paper, Programmable Wallets uses multi-party computation (MPC) technology to secure the assets and transactions of its users.

MPC-based services include ZenGo and Coinbase’s wallet-as-a-service solution, launched on Ethereum in May 2023.

The private key of a user is sharded into multiple parts that are distributed to third parties with high trustworthiness.

This is done to eliminate any single potential failure point.

In the second half of 2023, Circle intends to expand the beta for Programmable Wallets to other chains.