Introduction to Transferable Account

Introduction

Mycel is a decentralized platform that enables the transfer, management, and trading of accounts across different blockchain platforms. By creating a “Transferable Account,” which combines their own account with a threshold signature scheme (TSS) signed by Mycel, users can:

• Exchange assets across different blockchain platforms.
• Transfer assets across various smart contracts and rollups.
• Buy and sell accounts tied to specific activities.

As of 2024, with the emergence of Layer 2 solutions and various blockchains, users are required to maintain accounts for each environment, making management increasingly difficult year by year. By using Mycel’s Transferable Account, users can manage their assets across various platforms safely and efficiently.

In this article, we will explain what Transferable Accounts are in detail, and how they are designed to ensure the security of users’ assets.

Overview of Transferable Account

Mycel’s Transferable Account (TA) is a specialized account structure designed to facilitate secure cross-chain asset management and transfer. TA operates using multisig, ensuring that both the user and the verifier (Mycel) jointly manage the account. This design ensures that no single entity can arbitrarily manipulate the account or its assets, thus maintaining decentralization and enhancing security.

The Transferable Account is capable of handling various forms of assets, such as those represented in account balance format on Ethereum or in UTXO format on Bitcoin. It serves as a gateway that enables transactions between assets across all chains.

System Using Transferable Account

Conducting account exchanges using Mycel

If Alice wants to sell BTC on Bitcoin and acquire ETH on Ethereum using Mycel, she will follow the steps below:

1. Deposit BTC into the designated Bitcoin account and submit an Intent to Mycel

• Alice sends BTC to the Bitcoin address specified by Mycel.
• Alice submits an Intent, specifying ETH as the asset she wishes to acquire.

2. Resolution of the Intent and transfer of assets

• The submitted Intent is processed by a Solver, responsible for matching and executing the swap.
• The Solver prepares the required amount of ETH in an Ethereum account for executing the swap.

3. Verification of the transfer

• Mycel verifies whether the necessary amount of BTC is present in the Bitcoin account where Alice made the deposit and whether the required amount of ETH is available in the Ethereum account prepared by the Solver according to the Intent.

4. Updating ownership

• Once it is confirmed that the necessary assets are present in each account and they have been confirmed for a certain number of blocks, the ownership of the respective Transferable Accounts (TA) is exchanged.

As mentioned earlier, the TA is managed by a multisig controlled by both Mycel and Alice. By using both signatures from Alice and Mycel’s service, the authority as a signer on the TA that Alice owned is updated to another user, thereby transferring ownership of the TA.

If you want to learn more about Intents, please refer to the article below. https://medium.com/@mycel/understand-intents-fully-in-just-8-minutes-8c95ccfb55a1

FROST: Implementing Transferable Accounts with Threshold Signature Scheme

Until now, accounts generated with multi-signature (multisig) schemes could not change their signatories. If the signing party for a multisig account was changed, the public key and corresponding address of that account would also change.

However, by adopting a threshold signature scheme known as FROST (Flexible Round-Optimized Schnorr Threshold Signatures), it is now possible to update the signing party’s composition without changing the multisig account’s public key or address.

With FROST, an account managed by Alice and Mycel can be created on Bitcoin, and this multisig account managed on Mycel becomes a Transferable Account (TA). If Alice wants to send BTC to Bob, instead of executing a BTC transaction on Bitcoin, the signing party managing the TA is changed from Alice and Mycel to Bob and Mycel. This allows BTC to be transferred without actually executing a transaction on Bitcoin.

If Alice wishes to stop managing BTC on this TA, she can withdraw the BTC owned by the TA to a Bitcoin address specified by her at any time. This withdrawal process requires signatures from both Alice and Mycel signatories. Of course, the system is designed so that Mycel cannot withdraw assets from the TA on its own.

Conclusion

In this article, we explained the overview of Transferable Accounts proposed by Mycel and how they work. We hope that by understanding the TA mechanism, readers can join us in thinking about the new ecosystems that can be created with this innovation.

Mycel will continue to provide innovative experiences leveraging TA. If you’re interested in this project, please join our official Discord through the link below. Additionally, if you’re interested in Mycel’s development, feel free to contact us.

Official Discord: https://discord.gg/mycelland Official Twitter: https://x.com/mycelmycel

Reference

Mycel Docs https://docs.mycel.land

Frost https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/852.pdf