Ned

A few words about Solflare’s social login, since the question keeps coming up this weekend. First: we don’t use an underlying provider. No embedded wallet SDK, no auth company sitting between you and your keys. We built it ourselves. We looked at the providers before we did. What they run goes anywhere from “your recovery phrase sits in our database” to an MPC setup where the answer to “who can sign without me” is trust me bro. In every one we looked at, someone other than you can get to the key. That was a HARD NO for us. This is what we built instead (Quick Login in the app): 1. Your seed is generated on your device and encrypted there with a random key. That key is never derived from your PIN. 2. The key is split in three with Shamir. One part stays on your device, one goes to your own Google Drive or iCloud next to the encrypted backup, one is held by Solflare. Any two rebuild it. One alone is nothing. 3. Our part only comes out after your PIN checks out, and guesses are rate limited with longer waits after each wrong one. We never have the PIN. Now the bad days. Someone takes over your Google or Apple account: they get an encrypted blob and one share. Can’t open it, can’t brute force the PIN offline. Google or Apple themselves: same thing. OAuth is the login, not the key. Someone breaches our database: one useless share and a list of emails, not your wallet. Nobody can do it alone, and that includes us. The obvious pushback is that you still have to trust Solflare. You do, the same way you trust any wallet app with the code running on your phone, seed phrase wallets included. What you don’t have to do is trust us with the key. Our share alone opens nothing, and if you ever want us out of the picture you reveal the phrase, write it down and disconnect Quick Login. That deletes the cloud backup and our share. Then it’s just you and 12 words again. Hardware wallet and a metal plate is still the right setup for serious money, no argument. But the people who need social login were never going to do that, and “just get a Trezor” is how this industry keeps telling them self custody isn’t for them. The biggest misconception in all of this is that convenience and security are a trade-off and you have to pick one. They’re only a trade-off when the convenience is built on someone’s promise. Build it on math and you keep both. Keep safe.

As I write this, billions are leaving Binance’s hot wallets in what CZ himself calls a likely hack, with Tether and Circle freezing close to two billion of it. Three days ago our validator operator had its keys compromised. Different scale, same lesson: whoever holds the key holds the asset. Your staked SOL never left you this week, and it never could have. A validator’s keys can’t touch delegated stake. Solana working as designed. But every validator has one key that controls it, and for three years an operator held ours. When their keys were compromised, so was our validator, and your rewards stopped with it. And whoever runs the node also has to hold its identity key, a hot key sitting on the server, which is where block rewards landed by default. However you split the other keys, the operator stood in the money’s path. Until Alpenglow. The upgrade that went live this month is mostly talked about for finality and one-day epochs. Quietly, it also changed where a validator’s money goes: votes moved off-chain, and the owner can now point every reward stream at an account the operator never touches. Nobody had used that to take the operator out of the money’s path, as far as we can tell. We did, in a day, because we had to. The new Solflare validator is, as far as we know, the first on Solana run by a third-party operator who holds neither the controlling key nor the rewards. The withdraw authority sits in a Solflare multisig, so nobody can take the validator from us again, and if an operator’s keys are ever compromised we rotate them and keep going. Every reward stream lands in accounts only that multisig controls. @StakingFac runs the machines with operational keys we can rotate. Ownership and operations, separated. Staking Facilities are the people I called that night. We built @solanabeach_io with them in 2020, when SOL was under a dollar (for the new folks). Six years later, they’re still the people you call at midnight. If your stake is still on the old Solflare validator, move it in a few taps in the app. The new one runs at a lower commission, on top of covering the rewards you missed. Not your keys, not your coins. This week it applied to validators. Tonight it applies to the biggest exchange in the world.

But wait, there’s more: - Lower commission - We’re covering the staking rewards you missed during the pause - An in-app migration that moves your stake in a few taps, coming very soon - And I’ll personally be dropping Packs randomly on some of you who migrate Yes, we used this to make staking better HOLD STRONG

Today, we added Earn to Solflare. You can now lend USDC through @kamino from within the app. Our job is to make lending simple to access, with the returns and risks clear. We chose @Kamino for their fantastic track record: over $21B in loans originated with $0 bad debt to date. Earn brings another billion-dollar financial primitive into Solflare, alongside trading and staking. Solflare is the home for traders, stakers, lenders and stock investors alike.