In early September, an NFT project called Lasogettes was minted out. What is curious about their interface is a collection of buttons related to ‘EPS’ - the result of EIP-4886, “A proxy ownership register allowing trustless proof of ownership between Ethereum addresses, with delegated asset delivery.”

The pattern is composed of three main elements:

1. A nominating address is typically a cold wallet but could also be a hot wallet.

2. A proxy wallet. This wallet must always be hot.

3. A delivery address, which is optional but usually represents the cold wallet.

In short, users can:

1. Nominate to another address to act on their behalf.

2. Accept a nomination from the proxy.

3. Delete the relationship from the registry.

4. Optionally specify a delivery address for the asset in such cases as a mint (including back to the cold wallet.)

The benefit of the arrangement is timely in a world where contract interactions are illegible to the average user and hot wallets can be compromised by malicious transactions. More, the protocol is not an app but a fully on-chain protocol with no intermediary or reliance on centralized code or proprietary backends. EPSproxy.com maintains one interface, but it is also trivial for developers to build this into their applications.

The flow is intended to be simple: a cold wallet (nominator) nominates a hot wallet proxy through a single transaction. Once the nominator accepts, the on-chain registry contains the mapping. This is backward compatible, meaning that even for addresses without a proxy established, it will return a schema as if that address was both the nominator and the proxy. This compatibility allows non-proxy addresses queried through EPS to behave like a regular address but can simplify flow for developers.

Additionally, if a nominator-proxy pair is already established in the registry but that nominator address is sent to EPS by a dapp, the transaction reverts. This ensures that only the proxy account obtains the benefits of the assets held by the nominator- otherwise, two accounts would be able to get the same benefits. The nominator protects itself from abuse, but it must also give the proxy the account-associated benefits of direct use, permissions, or other features.

The obvious use case exemplified by the Lasogette team is to mint NFTs where qualification to mint is established by owning some other NFT, typically a targeted community of other NFT holders. In the future, we can imagine zero-knowledge proofs enhancing the privacy of the cold wallet.

With the boom in NFT uses, permissions and access are becoming embedded in NFTs. In addition, token-gating is rising, and administrators can integrate EPS queries to improve the sense of trust and security in connecting to token-gate bots or interfaces, hopefully opening up participation to more users.

In on-chain governance, token weight or one-NFT-one-vote systems can be more secure through the proxy pattern. They could improve governance involvement across cases as it makes participation safer, hopefully encouraging users to test out more governance features given their assets are secure in their cold wallet.

The most common implementation of proxy staking is in other PoS staking systems. It is typically conducted by a pair of accounts (a controller and a stash) where the controller has the right to perform a limited set of activities, including electing nominators/delegators, but the stash accrues rewards from staking. EPS in Ethereum could help secure dapp level staking or potentially more profound implementations post-merge.

Lastly, we might see uses of EPS that promote proxy wallet patterns that keep unwanted NFTs or spam tokens out of the cold or more official wallets. This is especially helpful as crypto becomes more popular in the same way that email was almost made unusable through a flood of spam in the ‘00s and ‘10s. Given that legal guidance on crypto is still unfolding, anything that helps users reduce their liabilities is a boon for crypto.

In early September, an NFT project called Lasogettes was minted out. What is curious about their interface is a collection of buttons related to ‘EPS’ - the result of EIP-4886, “A proxy ownership register allowing trustless proof of ownership between Ethereum addresses, with delegated asset delivery.”

The pattern is composed of three main elements:

1. A nominating address is typically a cold wallet but could also be a hot wallet.

2. A proxy wallet. This wallet must always be hot.

3. A delivery address, which is optional but usually represents the cold wallet.

In short, users can:

1. Nominate to another address to act on their behalf.

2. Accept a nomination from the proxy.

3. Delete the relationship from the registry.

4. Optionally specify a delivery address for the asset in such cases as a mint (including back to the cold wallet.)

The benefit of the arrangement is timely in a world where contract interactions are illegible to the average user and hot wallets can be compromised by malicious transactions. More, the protocol is not an app but a fully on-chain protocol with no intermediary or reliance on centralized code or proprietary backends. EPSproxy.com maintains one interface, but it is also trivial for developers to build this into their applications.

The flow is intended to be simple: a cold wallet (nominator) nominates a hot wallet proxy through a single transaction. Once the nominator accepts, the on-chain registry contains the mapping. This is backward compatible, meaning that even for addresses without a proxy established, it will return a schema as if that address was both the nominator and the proxy. This compatibility allows non-proxy addresses queried through EPS to behave like a regular address but can simplify flow for developers.

Additionally, if a nominator-proxy pair is already established in the registry but that nominator address is sent to EPS by a dapp, the transaction reverts. This ensures that only the proxy account obtains the benefits of the assets held by the nominator- otherwise, two accounts would be able to get the same benefits. The nominator protects itself from abuse, but it must also give the proxy the account-associated benefits of direct use, permissions, or other features.

The obvious use case exemplified by the Lasogette team is to mint NFTs where qualification to mint is established by owning some other NFT, typically a targeted community of other NFT holders. In the future, we can imagine zero-knowledge proofs enhancing the privacy of the cold wallet.

With the boom in NFT uses, permissions and access are becoming embedded in NFTs. In addition, token-gating is rising, and administrators can integrate EPS queries to improve the sense of trust and security in connecting to token-gate bots or interfaces, hopefully opening up participation to more users.

In on-chain governance, token weight or one-NFT-one-vote systems can be more secure through the proxy pattern. They could improve governance involvement across cases as it makes participation safer, hopefully encouraging users to test out more governance features given their assets are secure in their cold wallet.

The most common implementation of proxy staking is in other PoS staking systems. It is typically conducted by a pair of accounts (a controller and a stash) where the controller has the right to perform a limited set of activities, including electing nominators/delegators, but the stash accrues rewards from staking. EPS in Ethereum could help secure dapp level staking or potentially more profound implementations post-merge.

Lastly, we might see uses of EPS that promote proxy wallet patterns that keep unwanted NFTs or spam tokens out of the cold or more official wallets. This is especially helpful as crypto becomes more popular in the same way that email was almost made unusable through a flood of spam in the ‘00s and ‘10s. Given that legal guidance on crypto is still unfolding, anything that helps users reduce their liabilities is a boon for crypto.