I’m exploring how users from other chains - starting with Solana - can participate in our prediction markets (on BigMarket.ai) wit the least amount of friction and trust assumptions - e.g. I want them to be able to buy prediction shares, claim winnings etc using only their familiar Phantom wallet.
At a high level, the current solutions for cross chain use cases like this, require the Solana user to;
a) deposit funds on Stacks
b) authenticate with a clarity smart contract
c) authorise the contract call - eg buy shares in Market X
The Problem
Step a) has some difficulty around moving the users deposit from a wallet into an on-chain vault but this is outside the current scope.
This current solutions for b) and c) look like this;
Where both the Guardian verification and attestation layer and the ‘off-chain relayer’ carry trust assumptions and complexity and overall, increase the attack surface area of the application.
Really like this direction, and ed25519 in Clarity is a clean primitive to have regardless. Two pushbacks worth airing though @mikecohen.id
First, this solves authentication, not value transfer. A Solana user can sign a Stacks tx natively, but their SOL or USDC still has to get onto Stacks somehow — which means an onramp through Bitcoin, sBTC, or a bridge. So in practice this is an integration facilitator that removes the relayer/guardian middlemen on the auth layer, but the asset side still has the same trust and friction problems we have today. Worth being precise that this is half the puzzle, not the whole one.
Second, and more importantly, removing friction only matters if there’s a compelling reason to be on Stacks in the first place. If BigMarket is genuinely the best prediction market a Solana user can access, they’ll tolerate friction to get there — bridges, new wallets, all of it. Users crossed worse chasms for Hyperliquid. If the pull isn’t strong enough to overcome friction today, smoothing the UX won’t change the outcome; it’ll just make the empty room easier to walk into. So the proposal makes most sense paired with a clear answer to “why Stacks” — Bitcoin settlement, sBTC liquidity, something the user can’t get on their home chain.
That said, I’m in favor. Native ed25519 lowers the cost of every future cross-chain experiment, and the smart-wallet implications are huge: a Stacks account abstraction contract could register a Phantom pubkey as an authorized signer the same way we register passkeys today, and suddenly one vault is controllable from any ed25519 chain’s wallet. That composability is worth the SIP on its own.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment @Rapha23. I agree this requires a bridge to handle the deposit and that part is outside the scope of this change. I also agree that authorisation via a pubkey managed in Phantom wallet in clarity contracts is much bigger than our specific use case.
I’ve had the chance to collaborate with you in the past. It’s always a pleasure, live or async ser. Also s/o to you for the Bitcoin Clarity lib! Today live and in use at fakfun.com and jingswap.com