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Murmur

Noun. a low indistinct but often continuous sound

The murmur of the waves along the shore A murmur of voice

Murmur is a keyless crypto wallet protocol powered by the Ideal Network (IDN). Using timelock encryption and secure time-based one-time password (OTP) generation, murmur allows users to create and execute secure crypto wallets with no mnemonic or secret key - it is a truly keyless wallet solution. The protocol is designed to be versatile and can be used in a myriad of ways, from a terminal to twitch chats.

Murmur wallets can be accessed seamlessly across web-enabled devices, providing a frictionless plug-and-play solution for app developers to integrate web3 capabilities into applications and services without any additional infrastructure or overhead. Murmur wallets can be used by installing a standalone wallet client or by using our HTTP API, which allows you to easily create in-app wallets with seamless interoperability across browsers and other HTTP clients.

Why Murmur?​

Crypto wallets and account abstraction come in a myriad of flavors, custodial, non-custodial, MPC, and various other "wallet-as-a-service" solutions.

Murmur offers a distinct alternative to tradition MPC wallets. Normally, MPC wallets require wallet providers to issue threshold signatures on command. This can present several challenges, such as:

  • Scalability issues: More users means more requests for signatures and more load on the network
  • Increased Costs: Users can encounter significant fees for higher security, essentially placing wallet security behind a paywall

Murmur sidesteps these disadvantages by relying on the Ideal Network's randomness beacon to produce decryption keys for future OTP codes. Rather than producing threshold signatures on-demand, threshold signatures are produced with each block finalized by the IDN. This results in a highly scalable, cost-efficient, and decentralized wallet solution, where more users does not correlate with added computational overhead.

Key Features

  • Truly Keyless Wallet: No mnemonic or key management required.
  • No Wallet Provider: No reliance on a third-party provider for wallet access.
  • Infinitely Scalable: The Murmur protocol is designed to scale without increased computational or financial overhead, limited only by the underlying blockchain.
  • Non-Custodial: Users retain complete control of their wallets at all times. Even when opting for the convenience of HTTP-API-based access, only the heavy computational tasks are outsourced, ensuring full ownership remains with the user.
  • Secure Against Key Extraction Attacks: Unlike some threshold ECDSA approaches, Murmur uses threshold BLS signatures and is resistant to key extraction vulnerabilities (e.g. research by zengo-x).

Getting Started​

The murmur protocol is very flexible and can be used in various contexts, each with different trust models. Start here to learn more about the inner workings of the murmur protocol, or just jump into the code on github.

From a Browser or JS app Murmur can be used from any web-enabled javascript context by relying on the murmur.js library to communicate with the murmur-api, allowing for the creation and execution of in-app wallets. The murmur-api is a permissionless HTTP API that simply outsources the computation required to compute and encrypt OTP codes and merkle proofs. Murmur.js is a javascript library that lets developers easily integrate keyless crypto wallets into their applications. In conjunction with polkadot.js, it developers can add a 'wallet-as-a-service' mechanism to their applications with minimal effort.

Check out the browser integration guide to learn how to integrate murmur into your applications by communicating with the api. See out the library in action by exploring the murmur-dapp and murmur-bots repo. which includes both Discord and Twitch bots.

Standalone Client You can also run the murmur wallet using a standalone client. Try the cli for a terminal based client that allows you to create a wallet and execute basic balance transfers.

Question?​

If you have questions about Murmur or the Ideal network, get in touch by joining our discord channel.