The Lit community never ceases to amaze us.

We’ve seen projects use Lit’s distributed wallet keys, conditional encryption/decryption, and Lit Actions computing framework to simplify onboarding, off and cross-chain blockchain transactions, identity management, content publishing for subscribers, and much more. And the best is yet to come.

Here are some of the most popular ways people are using Lit today, and a glimpse at what’s ahead:

The Present

Fast and Familiar Web3 Onboarding

Projects like Tria use Lit to help users log into their dApps with familiar credentials like email, phone, or social media. Once authorized, users instantly have access to a wallet they can use within the dApp to send transactions or sign messages. 

The Lit Network’s distributed key generation, coupled with the fact that key fragments are also locked within the trusted execution environment on each node means each wallet is secure and non-custodial, despite being easy to access for the end user. Lit can also back up keys if they are misplaced or the user changes devices, allowing for quick account recovery.

Account Abstraction Wallet Signing

Projects like Alchemy, Patch, Pimlico, OpenFort, Biconomy, and others are using Lit under the hood as a signer for account abstraction wallets.

Account abstraction gives users an account that is controlled through a smart contract, rather than an externally owned and managed wallet on their device. This opens up flexible security policies, the ability to subsidize gas for the user or instantly swap tokens to cover gas, transaction batching and session-based signing to avoid multiple signature pop-ups, and more. These features can build off of Lit’s simplified onboarding flows mentioned above to make dApp interaction not only easier but also faster and resistant to theft and loss.

Published Content Access Control

Projects like Verify (Fox Corp) and Lens Protocol use Lit to control access to published data and content. This can include media like news articles, social media feeds, and unique NFT art. Publishers can define the conditions under which users who meet access requirements can decrypt each encrypted payload. Any condition can be used to gate access, from checking a Web 2.0 API to see if a user has an active paid subscription, to checking blockchains for asset ownership or DAO community contributions. And the service can attach attribution and licensing data to each bit of media to ensure users know they’re reading the real thing from the right sources.

Protecting and Sharing Identity Data and Verifiable Credentials

Projects like Terminal3, Gitcoin, Streamr, Oamo, Cheqd, KaratDAO, and Holonym use Lit’s decryption and Lit Actions to securely store personal identity information and help users grant access to data or verified credentials by decrypting it only for authorized recipients. Users can grant access to dApps to prove they are unique and human, selectively disclose PII with companies or governments, or even stream IOT data from their cars or devices. Conditions can include the user receiving payment for decryption, opening up the potential for user-controlled data markets. Services can also simplify verifiable credential issuance, automatically issuing credentials when users meet certain criteria as defined in a Lit Action.

DeFi Workflows

Projects like Genius, AlphaCapture, and SimpFi use Lit Actions to batch and execute complex decentralized blockchain operations with minimal user input. Each operation can be organized into a module and strung together with an interface to form trading strategies, asset custody flows, DAO policies, and more. These DeFi operations can be run on a single chain, or orchestrated across chains by checking chain state and signing using stored key material, all securely triggered within Lit Actions.

The Future

Sharing Credentials and Computing Over Secrets

A recent upgrade to the Lit Network has enabled decryption and signing within a Lit Action. Developers can now use Lit Actions to store, use, and compute over any secret material like Web 2.0 API keys, wallet keys, identity and credentials, corporate data, and more. This will enable community-controlled accounts that can be used to share access to Web 2.0 or blockchain services, trading bots with private strategies, oracles operating on private data sources, and more. 

You can learn more about these new features here.

Unifying Blockchains

With the ability to store, decrypt, and sign with wallet keys from any kind of chain within a Lit Action, exciting new cross-chain capabilities will emerge. We envision a future where users will be able to bridge to any chain from a single “home” chain account, improving UX for multi-chain trading and signing considerably. With a serverless bot run on Lit, Layer-2 transactions can also be rolled up to a base chain without centralized reporting servers run by foundations, increasing security for entire blockchain L2 ecosystems.

Beyond Keys

We feel Lit could soon act as the nexus for not only key management but also secure and trustworthy computing in general. We want to help dApps replace centralized infrastructure with decentralized and auditable serverless compute. Eventually, we’ll see federated corporate data cleanrooms, DeFi trading agents, or even private and verifiable community-owned AI that is trained on permissioned identity data that’s never custodied by middlemen.

The best is yet to come, and we want to help you build it!

Get Involved

Lit is hosting a hackathon to explore use cases for decryption within Lit Actions. Join us here.

You can explore everything we have to offer on our site and documentation, and reach out if you have questions or want to explore ideas with the community!