The Optimism-based wallet uses account abstraction to eliminate the need for seed phrases to recover lost crypto.

Fintech firm Eco has unveiled Beam, a new crypto wallet that supports payments on Layer 2 networks like Optimism and Coinbase’s Base protocol. The wallet incorporates account abstraction, made possible by the Ethereum standard ERC-4337, which enables programmable smart contract wallets.

Go to https://t.co/Fi666gQBVu and you’ll instantly have a wallet.

Then save access with your Twitter account. You’ll get some free $ECO to send.

Plus, if you’re Twitter verified, you’ll get enough $ECO to register your own Beam Name before someone else does… 👀

— Andy Bromberg (@andy_bromberg) July 27, 2023

According to Andy Bromberg, the CEO of Eco, the wallet doesn’t require users to own ETH in order to send tokens on-chain for fixed, low fees.

“Beam is a stablecoin & ECO payment wallet that looks and feels as much like a web2 P2P app as anything I’ve ever seen. Like global, onchain Venmo,” he said on Twitter. 

The wallet comes with features that will likely make onboarding Web3 users far more simplified. For instance, unlike other self-custodial crypto wallets, users won’t need to download the application and can create a wallet address through a QR code on the Beam website. 

This QR code will generate a link to a wallet address, to which users can transfer USDC from their existing wallets or use Moonpay to convert fiat to crypto. Users can also send this QR code to other users who wish to send them crypto, and backup their wallet by clicking “save access” and logging into their Twitter accounts.

In this way, the user can recover their accounts through a Twitter login and password, instead of relying on the 16-word seed phrase that other wallets require to recover crypto in the event that their device fails.

The wallet uses Web3Auth to backup accounts, a distributed private key management solution that facilitates digital identities as cross-platform identifiers for blockchain applications.

Eco has raised $95 million in funding to date and is backed by high-profile investors like a16z, Pantera Capital and Coinbase Ventures. The wallet will support the protocol’s native token ECO and USDC.