From smart contracts to smart teams: Splits in 2024 and 2025

Splits makes tools for building and earning together onchain. If you have onchain revenue, we’re devoted to making your life easier.

Crypto payments are an incredibly powerful technology, but until now onchain teams have lacked the business infrastructure to wield that power to the fullest. Splits Teams has been a gamechanger for us internally, and we hope it will be for you too.

Imagine a world in which your onchain operations are actually convenient, while your funds are still protected according to state-of-the-art industry best practices. It’s a radical UX upgrade, one that only recently became possible at all. Now our goal is to spread the solution.

This year Splits has accomplished three big things:

• Upgraded the app to multichain mode for today’s Ethereum landscape.
• Shipped Splits v2 to strengthen and expand the functionality of our core contracts.
• Launched Splits Teams, a multichain banking experience that is fast, flexible, and secure — yes, all at once — thanks to smart wallets and passkeys.

That third bullet point is the big one.

We wrapped up Splits v2 in May, at which point Teams became the company’s primary focus. Dogfooding the product has solved many of Splits’ own headaches with onchain ops, and feedback from early users has echoed our relief and delight. Orchestrating a system of accounts is hard and often requires jumping between various apps, networks, and interfaces. We've learned the value of being able to quickly manage all your accounts and create sub-accounts for specific purposes.

In 2025 we will continue onboarding users who need a robust solution for managing onchain assets across multiple wallets, networks, and contributor roles.

The development process has been educational, in the way it always is at the bleeding edge.

Challenges#

Product design#

Developing Splits Teams confronted us with conceptual hurdles first, before we encountered the technical ones. For one thing, we had to realize that Teams is a different product from the preexisting Splits app (a purpose-built block explorer servicing all Splits contracts). Teams offers such different functionality versus the simple payment contracts that we've totally separated the two apps, to the benefit of both.

More broadly, blockchain networks are young enough that "best practices" often merit reconsideration, especially when building tools for sophisticated users. Hence we deviate from industry standards whenever we think we can improve on the status quo.

The best example of this is our send-and-autoswap payments flow. We prompt Teams users to consider what the payment recipient should get, versus what they want to send. So instead of the user inputting "send 5 USDC to vitalik.eth on Base," the user inputs "make sure vitalik.eth receives 5 USDC on Base."

Those directives may seem equivalent at first glance, but the latter is concerned with how the payment request will be fulfilled. Payment currency is dictated by the needs of the business relationship rather than whatever arbitrary token balances the user has on hand.

On the backend, if the user only has ETH on Optimism, we can bundle together a swap to USDC, a bridge to Base, and a transfer to vitalik.eth, all in a single user operation. This would not be possible if we followed existing, more imperative design patterns typical of most crypto apps and wallets.

Generally, we’ve tried to design Teams from first principles, rather than purely copying existing UI/UX patterns. By focusing on desired outcomes rather than specific steps, we've created flows that handle complexity without burdening the user with implementation details.

Signers#

Alas, we didn’t escape technical hurdles. (Would it be any fun if we did?)

It’s been difficult to manage signers across networks — both existing signers and future ones. Our current solution works, but it’s clunky, and depends heavily on initial account configuration. Alongside Coinbase, Gnosis, and others, we're investing resources into elegantly solving this problem (i.e. KeyStore rollup).

Multichain have also been tricky to nail down. Allow a user to sign one transaction, and now they’re able to perform operations on multiple blockchains (since all the multichain data is included in the “single” transaction that the user signs). What if you are removing a signer from your account and you successfully remove it on three networks, but the operation fails on the fourth network?

The stakes are high, as inconsistent signer states across networks can leave users uncertain about their account's actual configuration. We've focused intensely on error handling and recovery flows so users can understand what went wrong and how to fix it themselves. The ultimate goal is perfect signer synchronization across all networks — anything less risks confusion and potential security issues.

This intersection of UX and security considerations exemplifies the unique challenges of building multichain infrastructure. Clear error communication is paramount when a single operation spans multiple networks, each with its own potential failure modes.

Passkeys#

The rapidly evolving passkey landscape has added another layer of complexity to Teams development. When we began implementing passkeys, infrastructural support felt provisional and limited. Ongoing development and adoption — for example, Chrome's newly comprehensive cross-device syncing — have validated our choice while requiring continuous adaptation.

Tooling and infrastructure for smart wallet development is still pretty raw. We’re fortunate to work on these problems alongside partners like Pimlico. Their tooling handles much of the actual onchain interactions for us, and their team has been very responsive to questions.

Tenderly has also been extremely helpful. In particular, we heavily use their simulation tool, especially for finding issues with our transaction signatures (since passkey signatures onchain are a bit more complicated than regular EOA signatures).

Wallet woes#

We’re working through a couple classic wallet problems: gas estimates and spam.

Submitting transactions from smart accounts is fraught with edge cases. Finding the best method for calculating gas estimates has been tough. When submitting a transaction, we need to include the max amount of gas the user is willing to pay (though usually the final result ends up being lower).

There’s a delicate balance to strike: we want that number to be as low as possible, but if it’s too low, the user gets an error and their transaction fails to make it onchain. It’s challenging to determine the right gas amount reliably, especially since some L2 gas prices fluctuate quickly with traffic spikes.

And then there's spam, which plagues Web3. Imagine if you logged into chase.com, opened your checking account, and saw a bunch of incoming transactions for less than 1 cent with memos like “visit www.winfreemoney.com”. Well, that’s how it works onchain; the permissionless nature of public blockchains means that anyone can send tokens or messages to any address.

While existing spam filtering tools help, they're far from perfect. We've implemented our own filtering rules to catch the obvious cases, while empowering users to customize their filters for anything that slips through.

Thank you to Splits engineers Jonathan Cai and Mike Howard for contributing to the "Challenges" section.

Ecosystem#

We’re still building Teams' core functionality in preparation for a public beta release. Next, we’re excited to integrate key services and utilities from the broader onchain ecosystem — ENS, Hypersub, Zora rewards, etc.

Meanwhile, current Teams users have expressed interest in greater "vertical coverage" that extends “above” and “below” their onchain accounts, so to speak. Think on- and off-ramps, accounting services, and potentially credit or staking products.

Teams users are united by the need to simplify complex multichain operations without compromising security. Whether it's a protocol team managing multiple development funds or a creative collective alternating public mints and commissioned work, Splits Teams can eliminate the hassle and anxiety from juggling multiple wallets across networks.

If you're managing onchain operations across multiple networks and looking for a more streamlined solution, we'd love to hear from you. Reach out to get early access to Teams and help shape the future of onchain financial operations.

Yesterday and tomorrow#

2024 saw Splits' repertoire expand from a suite of specialized payment contracts to a comprehensive financial platform. This mirrors the maturing needs of the Ethereum ecosystem: as onchain activity sprawls across networks, builders need infrastructure that scales with them without sacrificing security. And it wouldn’t hurt to have an intuitive, convenient crypto experience at their disposal.

The challenges we've faced this year — from rethinking basic wallet UX to wrestling with cross-chain complexities — have been equal parts frustrating and enlightening. That’s how it goes you're trying to make something genuinely new. Ideally, Teams will not be just another wallet or multisig tool; we want to fundamentally change how onchain teams form and operate.

Looking ahead to 2025, we're doubling down on what we've learned: teams need infrastructure that just works, regardless of which chain they're using or what operation they're trying to execute. The multichain future isn't some distant vision anymore — it's here, it's messy, and we're making it manageable. One passkey at a time.