Web3Auth launches Firebase wallet extension

Web3Auth, a wallet-as-a-service infrastructure provider, has launched a noncustodial wallet extension on Firebase, Google’s mobile development platform.

Now, the thousands of businesses and the millions of applications that use Firebase — the New York Times, Lyft and Venmo to name a few — can get their customers using crypto with Web3Auth’s extension.

Web3Auth, which also powers popular crypto storage solution Trust Wallet, uses a multi-party computation (MPC) setup to secure users’ assets. MPC wallets split a user’s keys into several parts, often called shards.

Co-founder and CEO of Web3Auth, Zhen Yu Yong, told Blockworks in May that his company shards users’ private key into three parts: the user’s device, a social login provider and a recovery method. For a user to access their assets, at least two methods must be triggered.

The recovery methods for Web3Auth includes a manual backup of the device key shard, an SMS one-time passcode and a recovery email.

But for its Firebase extension, Web3Auth told Blockworks that social logins are the only supported recovery methods.

“Users can choose either one of email, Google, Apple, Telegram or Discord among others,” Web3Auth wrote.

According to a press release shared with Blockworks, latency times for people logging in are under 1.5 seconds, which Web3Auth chalks up to its collaboration with Google Cloud for over a year.

“For an unparalleled performance to meet global demand, we needed a multi-region cloud infrastructure setup across the world at Web3Auth,” Yong said in a statement. “This Firebase extension sits on top of Google Cloud.”

He continued, “No matter where you are in the world, any Web2-centric application or Web3-native dapp can now allow its users to use their social logins with uniform login times.”

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