We are excited to announce that the Squads Smart Account Program is now deployed on mainnet, providing developers with a high-performance, low-overhead infrastructure layer for building stablecoin payment systems and deploying smart wallets at scale.
Why We Built This
Since 2022, when we first launched smart contract wallets on Solana, we've been at the forefront of making onchain asset management intuitive and secure, with over 300 teams and thousands of individuals trusting our technology to secure more than $10B in assets and process over $3B in stablecoin transfers.
The first iterations of our smart contract wallets built for business use cases and multisig workflows, delivered the security and programmability enterprises demanded. Yet as the ecosystem evolved, we identified a clear gap in the market. Payment providers and wallet teams consistently approached us with three requirements: synchronous execution for responsive user experiences, dramatically lower deployment costs to enable mass adoption, and flexible policy controls for diverse application needs.
Today, we're introducing the Smart Account Program which powers Squads API to enable the future generation of wallets, payments and financial services at scale. This new program eliminates the traditional tradeoffs between programmability, security, and cost that have historically limited smart wallet adoption. The Smart Account Program is live on mainnet, fully audited by OtterSec and formally verified by Certora. With this announcement, we are both outlining what's live today and laying the foundation for what's coming soon.
The Smart Account Program
Smart contract wallets have traditionally forced developers to choose between programmability, cost, and security. The Smart Account Program eliminates this trilemma with an architecture that delivers on all fronts:
Programmability: Flexible policies that create tailored user experiences
Cost: Optimizations that make mass deployment economically practical
Security: Options ranging from simple keypairs to enterprise-grade authentication
Here's how the Smart Account Program delivers in each dimension:
Programmability
Multi-signature: Create programmatically managed smart contract wallets with m-of-n signature threshold schemes, enabling collaborative control with customizable approval requirements.
Admin Keys: Designate admin keys with full control over smart contract wallet settings, allowing authorized administrators to manage operations and policy configurations.
Permissions: Define granular authorization rules for different keys and entities, ensuring appropriate access levels for various participants.
Direct Debits: Enable authorized third parties to withdraw predefined amounts from accounts, creating frictionless payment experiences without compromising security.
Subscriptions: Authorize recurring payments with configurable parameters for amount, frequency, and duration. Enable third parties to establish automated billing cycles while maintaining user control through customizable caps and cancellation options.
Time Locks: Implement execution delays through configurable time-locks. Approved transactions can be scheduled for future execution with mandatory waiting periods, enabling review windows and automated transaction queuing.
We are developing advanced policies for granular wallet control such as interaction restrictions limiting the programs a wallet can interact with, all the way down to specifying whitelisted instructions and valid inputs.
Cost
Atomic Policy Enforcement and Transaction Execution: Enforce policy checks and execute transactions in the same operation, eliminating the multi-step approach required with traditional smart contract wallet programs. This delivers the simplicity of regular keypair interactions while maintaining smart wallet programmable policies and security.
Rent-Free Account Creation (coming soon): Generate smart contract wallet addresses with pre-encoded policies without upfront rent payments. This transforms smart wallet economics by allowing developers to create addresses for millions of potential users with minimal initial investment, paying rent only when wallets become active. For example, deploy up to 1 million wallets for just 2.5 SOL total (0.0000025 SOL per wallet)—compared to the traditional $0.30 per wallet cost.
Security
Extensive Authentication Capabilities
Solana Keypairs: Full support for native Solana keypairs.
MPC/TEE Based Signing: Compatible with Multi-Party Computation and Trusted Execution Environment signing solutions.
Alternative Signature Schemes (coming soon)
We are actively co-developing passkey support for Solana, which will extend the signing capabilities of the Smart Account Program with all the authentication methods outlined below – planned for Q2 2025.
Session Keys: Temporarily delegate signing authority to another key for convenience, enabling smoother interactions without compromising security.
Passkeys: Support for phishing-resistant authentication without requiring users to manage cryptographic keys,
BTC and EVM Support: Use Bitcoin and Ethereum signers with your smart contract wallets through secp256k1 signature scheme support.
What You Can Build
The Squads Smart Account Program is designed for programmable wallets and stablecoin account deployment, but can be used for any application that requires secure, scalable account infrastructure:
Stablecoin Neobanks
Deploy financial applications with direct debits and real-time settlement. Synchronous execution delivers the instant confirmation users expect, while compliance controls ensure regulatory requirements are met.
Smart Wallets
Launch wallet infrastructure for millions of users without prohibitive costs. The new account unit economics make large-scale user acquisition viable, with passkey support arriving in the second half of Q2 2025.
E-commerce Marketplaces
Build payment systems with escrow capabilities for secure buyer-seller transactions. Gas abstraction creates a frictionless checkout experience without requiring native tokens.
AI Agent Infrastructure
Deploy autonomous financial agents with programmable authorization logic. Spending limits and transaction policies provide guardrails for automated systems to operate securely within defined parameters.
Squads API: The Abstraction Layer
Developers should be able to fully leverage the Smart Account Program without having to worry about the underlying complexities of the protocol, keeping their focus on building and shipping products. That's why we've developed Squads API, to abstract the complexities of interacting with the Smart Account Program, turning multi-step blockchain processes into simple RESTful API calls.
The API extends the functionality of the Smart Account Program with comprehensive transaction management and support for flexible fee payment models, including gas abstraction and sponsored transactions, which eliminates the requirement for you or your end-users to hold a specific token (e.g. SOL).
Squads API makes building with smart accounts as easy as building with a regular keypair, handling everything from account management to transaction building. Benefiting developers with onchain programmability without the overhead of custom logic.
Crossmint is the first partner to leverage the Smart Account Program via Squads API, bringing Solana smart wallet capabilities to their developer ecosystem. The Squads API is currently available under permissioned access – contact us if you're interested in being one of our early partners.
Get Started
The Smart Account Program is live on mainnet, powered by Solana's high-performance network and secured by its global ecosystem of 1,000+ validators.
Solana developers and wallet builders: the Smart Account Program is here to unlock the full potential of SVM account abstraction capabilities to allow you to deliver the best smart contract wallet experiences for your users.
Institutions, fintechs and PSPs: stablecoins enable you to gain a competitive edge by lowering costs and delivering instantly global solutions to your users. The Squads API enables you to adopt this technology in a secure and scalable way.
Startups looking to build the next generation of financial services products: you now have the tools to build the next Ramp, Stripe, or Revolut.
Check out the Smart Account Program Github repo here and contact us if you're interested to start building with Squads API.
