Introducing: Porto Developer Preview

What if passwords did not exist? What if the web was built natively for payments?

Porto is our open source Typescript library which gives accounts the superpowers to answer these two questions. Today, we are releasing the Porto Developer Preview, and we are excited to share that Porto is live on Base Sepolia, and coming soon to every EVM chain in production.

With Porto, you can create new accounts or upgrade existing ones by plugging into your preferred authentication layer, WebAuthn via Passkeys, or OAuth via Privy. No passwords, apps, seed phrases, private keys, or browser extensions needed.

Porto connects authentication with powerful execution capabilities⁠, solving some of the hardest problems that have haunted crypto application developers for the last years around onboarding, transacting on multiple chains, and paying predictable fees in stablecoins.

Our core principles:

• Developer-first: Porto works seamlessly with Wagmi and Viem, the most widely used web3 frontend libraries, without any code changes.
• Performance & cost-effectiveness: Porto is powered by a reimagined account abstraction stack, which is >50% more gas efficient on payments than alternatives, and offers state of the art transaction latency.
• Modularity: Porto works standalone or headless, letting you enjoy the benefits of the Porto stack without changing any of the flows your users and developers love!.

Beyond crypto applications, we think Porto works well with: traditional passkey setups, existing key management systems, and crypto wallets.

Check out the demo, our documentation and join the Telegram group for developers. If you’re excited to build a Porto-powered application, reach out to georgios@ithaca.xyz to chat!

Build with Porto, share what you build.

Getting started is as simple as it gets.

We are excited to work with early adopters on:

1. Ideas on what to build: We have more ideas on what you can build with Porto than people, some published on the Paradigm blog; others will emerge as we surf the frontier together.
2. Hands-on Technical Support: You’ll get dedicated Ithaca team resources, scheduled integration support sessions, and priority support leading to your application’s launch.
3. New Features: You’ll be able to share your feedback on what new features we should prioritize in our roadmap.

Tag @gakonst & @ithacaxyz on X & Farcaster to share your work!

Porto solves some of the hardest crypto developer problems, today.

We tackle the hardest problems in crypto from first principles. Our team has built the most used open source tools across the entire stack like Reth, Foundry, Wagmi and Viem, giving us the ability to reinvent the wheel when we think it is the right thing to do.

Here are some of the most important solutions we provide:

• Friction Free UX & Onboarding:
  • No Chrome extensions, API keys, private keys, seed phrases. Porto can be integrated in minutes for teams, and users can enjoy its benefits without downloading extra software, like wallet apps or extensions. It provides passwordless authentication via WebAuthn & Passkeys and has excellent support for OAuth via Privy or other key management services so you do not need to think or educate your users about managing secrets.
  • Apple Pay-powered fiat onramp, up to $500/user. Porto enables you to onboard users with Apple Pay, thanks to our awesome fiat onramp partners, available in USA ($500/week/user), Canada ($500/lifetime), Europe ($500/lifetime). More options soon! This will be enabled on the upcoming Base Mainnet deployment, while the current Base Sepolia deployment uses a faucet.
  • Onboard your users with targeted promotions. Porto enables you to onboard users and provide them with their first few dollars to transact or pay for their fees via ergonomic APIs for determining if a user has engaged with you or your partners’ applications in certain ways.
• Cost & Efficiency:
  • Predictable, fixed fees for users, paid in any supported currency. No company streams their AWS bill straight to their customers. Porto lets users pay fixed fees in any of the Porto-supported stablecoins they hold (USDC, USDT, etc) so your users do not need to hold any chain’s gas token.
  • Reliable next-block inclusion for high performance blockchains. Porto’s optimized infrastructure gets you included in the next block, handling retries and gas escalation. We have been working on infrastructure for the last 5 years with Reth & Foundry and we know how to land transactions. Live dashboard for tracking soon!
  • >50% more cost-efficient than alternatives. Porto’s gas-optimized smart contracts are state of the art in cost and allow higher throughput. This is achieved through a new account abstraction architecture and threat model vs ERC4337; documented here.
• Programmability:
  • Account delegation & subscriptions:. Porto enables delegation of your account to third parties, which we demonstrated in EXP-0002 and EXP-0003. This enables SaaS-style subscriptions, gaming, creator payments, and agentic workflows. We think this is one of the most exciting areas for innovation.
  • Upgrading the existing wallet userbase: Utilizing EIP-7702, all or a subset of Porto’s superpowers can be provided to the existing set of “EOA wallets” which do not have smart contract capabilities. If you’re a wallet and do not have an EIP-7702 strategy, reach out!

Where are we going?

We think that every account should be a Porto account. To achieve that, we will need two things:

1. Enabling Porto accounts to securely hold billions of dollars. For this developer preview, we have deployed the Porto Account to Base Mainnet with an initial bug bounty. While we have deep smart contract security expertise through our work on developing Foundry, we are also looking for EVM auditors and security engineers that want to work with us on securing the Porto Accounts (reach out to georgios@ithaca.xyz or @gakonst on Telegram). In the meantime, we are continuing to develop our security code for Porto so that we can provide institutional-custody level of security to everyday users, starting with our multisig module.
2. Enabling developers to get paid from anywhere, while deploying their application on the network of their choice (e.g. either they own their stack, or they are being subsidized by another platform). Solving interoperability in crypto at the application layer is a hard problem, but one we are solving next.

We are thrilled for today’s Porto Developer Preview. Check out the demo, our documentation and join the Telegram group for developers. If you’re excited to build a Porto-powered application, reach out to georgios@ithaca.xyz to chat!

Want to work on the highest impact problems in crypto? We are actively hiring at Ithaca. Apply now.