Growing the
onchain economy

Intro

Squads Labs mission is to accelerate the onchain economy by building products for teams and individuals to manage and scale their onchain operations.

Our history

In 2021, we formed the company to build tools that allow onchain organizations to manage assets and collectively make decisions.
At the time, we thought that all onchain organizations could and should be DAOs - decentralized communities leveraging onchain infrastructure to come together and govern digital assets and protocols. However, we quickly discovered that if you make transactions cheaper and faster - more traditional (centralized) organizations start to explore how to use blockchains for their operations as well.

This discovery led to our focus on smart account technology and full-stack products for teams and enterprises building their businesses on Solana, a group that inevitably required a solution to manage their treasury (raised funds, grants, revenue) and developer (programs, validators) assets.

For our initial customers, the primary use of smart accounts and the Squads platform was multisignature capabilities for managing program upgrades. Solana programs are upgradeable by default and securely handling program upgrade authority is a top priority for any serious enterprise. Our early success came from solving this core problem by combining a well-designed program upgrade experience (reminiscent of traditional SaaS) with secure smart account technology.

As confidence in the security of our smart accounts grew and our product experience further improved, more and more Solana businesses started shifting their operations onchain, including traditional functions previously managed on legacy financial rails - like employee and contractor payroll. Fast forward to today, our smart accounts are the standard for the SVM ecosystem, securing over $10 billion in value. Our products are used by all the major enterprises active in Solana today managing a wide variety of onchain assets such as programs, treasuries, tokens and validators.

Core beliefs

Our experience led to several core beliefs that we always go back to when making strategic decisions and roadmap planning:

• blockchains are superior to traditional infrastructure that powers economic activity in the world today because they are open, trustless, permissionless, transparent and efficient
• blockchains will continue to scale over time
• as blockchains scale, more economic activity will migrate onchain
• more economic activity happening onchain is a net good for efficiency and economic productivity in the world
• smart accounts is the technology that enables a secure and easy way to transact, manage and own digital assets, thus leading to more economic activity happening onchain.

Mission

We are betting on a future where an ever-increasing amount of productive economic activity happens onchain. In other words, we believe that the onchain economy will and should grow. We want to accelerate that future and make it happen faster.

Our mission is to grow the onchain economy.

We believe we can achieve that by building products and services that make it easy and intuitive for enterprises and individuals to transact, manage and own digital assets.

We will grow the onchain economy by building products and services that:

• simplify the process of running your business operations onchain (Squads)
• make personal custody of digital assets secure (Fuse)
• enable developers to easily integrate secure digital asset custody primitives into their products (Otacon).

An integral part in achieving this mission was, and will continue to be, the smart account technology (Squads Protocol) that we have been developing for the SVM since 2021 and will continue to advance in the years to come.

Technology

Blockchains are public ledgers, and all ledgers need an account structure to store data. Traditional accounts used for owning, managing and transacting digital assets are:

• simple "data storage buckets" that can't store/execute code
• rigid with a one-size-fits-all model
• controlled by a private key

We call these traditional accounts - light accounts. You have used a light account when interacting with Phantom, Backpack, Metamask or any other traditional crypto wallet.

These light accounts can become programmable by leveraging account abstraction, which decouples the object holding your tokens (the account) from the object authorized to move these tokens (the private key). With account abstraction, every account can be programmed and empowered with customized logic to validate and execute transactions. We call these programmable accounts - smart accounts.

Here’s a concise definition of smart accounts: "a configurable onchain account governed by code," and a more nuanced one: “(i) a programmable user account; which (ii) contains the necessary logic to securely custody and manage digital assets; and (iii) introduces various UX improvements such as multi-signature, recoverability, lack of seed phrase and gas abstraction.”

Think of conventional accounts like basic ledgers – they can store and transfer assets, but lack expression. Smart accounts add a layer of intelligence, allowing developers to set parameters and define rules and logic that will govern how you or anyone else can interact with the digital assets in the account. 

We believe smart accounts will be the technology powering the vast majority of onchain economic activity allowing users to secure their digital wealth and programmatically define how they interact with blockchain ecosystems. A world where users don’t pay gas or any other infrastructure costs when interacting with apps on blockchains will be made possible by smart accounts, while light accounts will remain valuable entry points for seamless onboarding and app interactions.

Our smart account technology is specifically designed for the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) because we believe scale and performance are necessary to migrate significant economic activity onchain. Solana aims to achieve scale by tightly coupling highly optimized software with performant hardware to offer extremely low latency, high throughput and sub-cent fees. Most importantly, Solana prioritizes this level of performance while maintaining a decentralized network with thousands of nodes. This approach and the idea of scaling the base layer to its limits before turning to modularity and rollups greatly resonates with us, hence we remain committed to advancing the SVM ecosystem with our products and technology.