In the context of AA, two main benefits are usually brought up: batching and gas sponsorship.

Those are very powerful, but I think there's another important benefit that's often overlooked: access control.

In the context of DeFi, you can think of asset management, but you can provide access to much more than that. It could be your Farcaster account, or it could be even your front door lock once tokenized. Note that the access is granular, i.e. you can define specific conditions on which the access is given.

The most widely adopted permission system in crypto is ERC20 approvals. It lets you transfer management of your tokens, usually to a smart contract. Powerful, but pretty boring.

Another example is Delegate, which lets users link assets from their cold wallet to the hot wallet. Interestingly, it doesn't really transfer rights to manage the assets but rather creates an onchain link between two wallets. This is particularly helpful when the proof of ownership is enough, e.g. to claim airdrops.

A great example on the other side of the spectrum would be @safe Zodiac Roles, with the most notable adoption story being @karpatkey DAO mgmt services. They recently published a write-up on their infrastructure:

A great example on the other side of the spectrum would be @safe Zodiac Roles, with the most notable adoption story being @karpatkey DAO mgmt services. They recently published a write-up on their infrastructure: https://www.karpatkey.com/contents/on-chain-non-custodial-asset-management-infrastructure

Then there are DeFi platforms like DefiSaver and InstaDapp, where you can delegate a position to a smart account.

There are other examples of permission systems that live on Ethereum and other chains, but those are limited in use. Why?

1/ Security. I'd say this is 10x more important than all other factors combined. A dead simple ERC20 approval system led to millions (billions?) of onchain USD stolen. A more flexible system would unlock more use cases, but it would also increase the attack surface.

2/ Lack of dapp support. Dapps simply won't let you perform any actions on behalf of other accounts. This is a subclass issue of dapps generally not handling smart accounts well. Zodiac had to create a dapp browser with custom tooling to enable their use case.

There's EIP5792, but it is mostly concerned with batching support. Maybe someday we will see a standard for dapp permission support, but not today.

3/ Lack of user wallets/tools. Even if we assume we could use all the dapps easily, there is no easy way to set up a manager account. Those systems are too flexible to have a simple UI.

On top of that, there are many ways to implement permissions:

1) Access control hooks (full control over SA activity, very powerful for better or worse)
2) Roles and KernelV3-like conditional validators (granular, easy to expand, limited in control)
3) Executors (perfect for custom use cases, require custom Solidity)

There is also segmentation through competing standards, which I don't think is going to go away anytime soon. There's no silver bullet when it comes to permissions.

What would this unlock? Well, what would having institutional-grade infra that manages >billion of USD in DAO assets in a non-custodial way available to everyone unlock?

- a proliferation of asset management offerings, particularly wetware-based management

- better tools for airdrop claiming and other low-reward high-risk activity; you should never be prompted to connect your cold wallet for any activity, let alone sign anything
- the rise of conditional management (e.g. you can post as a Lens account if you own the NFT)

I've been thinking through this almost 5 years ago (https://destiner.io/blog/post/wallet-delegate/). Even considered going full time to solve this. Fortunately, I didn't, my design was terrible. Now we seem to have solved this on the Solidity/infra level. Time for a compelling user experience.

Access control, or permissions, let us define the granular rules to access a particular resource.

In essence, permissions decouple ownership from management.

i am just now reading about scope sh 👀🎉