How To: Building your first Vincent App

What is Vincent?

Today, both users and developers face the same challenge: once you give an app or agent access, you’re relying on trust alone. There’s no built-in system of guardrails that ensures operations are carried out exactly as intended. For individual users, this creates risk. For vault and DeFi app developers, it limits how far they can safely automate on behalf of their users.

Vincent was designed to solve this problem. It provides a framework for secure transaction delegation, keeping users as the ultimate root of authority while still allowing apps and agents to act on their behalf.

For developers, this unlocks something concrete: the ability to add cross-chain automation directly into existing products. Instead of building complex infrastructure for scheduling, key management, or multi-chain execution, developers can rely on Vincent to provide these primitives securely.

The long-term thesis is that agents will eventually handle most operations for us. Vincent makes that vision safe and enforceable. But even today, vaults and DeFi protocols can integrate Vincent to power new forms of automation—such as recurring deposits, portfolio rebalancing, or strategy execution—while keeping users fully in control.

Getting Started

If you’re ready to build:

• Fork the Vincent Starter App repo
• Explore the Vincent Ability Starter Kit
• Review the Vincent Docs to go over key concepts and SDK usage details

Additionally, reference the video below for a complete walkthrough.

Key Concepts

Before diving into the starter guide, here’s a quick refresher on the core Vincent building blocks:

• Abilities: Modular, reusable building blocks that define specific actions (e.g., approve ERC-20 tokens, swap on Uniswap).
• Policies: Sets of rules that govern when, how, and by whom Abilities can be executed. Policies are configured by users according to their personal preferences.
• Apps: End-user experiences built by combining Abilities and Policies into a cohesive product flow.
• Vincent Wallet: Your multi-chain account secured by the Lit network. When you interact with a given Vincent app or agent, it will prompt you to delegate signing capabilities from your Vincent Wallet to specific Vincent abilities. By delegating these signing capabilities, you enable the Vincent App to execute specific operations on your behalf.

The Vincent Starter App & Starter Kit

To make it easier for developers to get hands-on with Vincent, we’re excited to release two resources:

• Vincent Starter App: A complete Vincent App reference implementation demonstrating how to build a Vincent App from end to end. The demo app showcases how you can schedule and execute recurring DCA (Dollar-Cost Averaging) transactions into wBTC on behalf of your users. As a developer, you can use the starter app repo to learn how to integrate Vincent Abilities and Policies into a fully functional app experience.
• Vincent Ability Starter Kit: Additional reference implementations for new Vincent developers demonstrating how to create your first Vincent Abilities and Policies. The starter kit includes end-to-end tests that automatically build, deploy, and exercise the example Ability and Policy on your behalf. 

Together, these resources provide both a working example and a toolkit for builders ready to create the next generation of Vincent apps.