Multi-signature (multisig) on Unicove

An outline of how Unicove can be used today to perform multisig transactions.

One of the most powerful features of Antelope-based blockchains in my opinion is its multi-signature (multisig or msig) capabilities. Not enough people know what it is or how to use it. I’ve had a handful of conversations over the past week on this topic and decided to do a quick article outlining how Unicove integrates and offers multisig transactions.

If you are a participant on a multisig account today and you need to be able to propose or approve transactions, hopefully this helps. Otherwise if you’re not a multisig participant but are curious on this functionality, read on!

Advanced Mode

If you’re using the multisig functionality of the blockchain - I’d currently consider you to be an advanced user. This isn’t the kind of thing the average user will use (yet?), so all of this functionality is hidden behind the Advanced Mode setting.

Go into Settings and toggle Enable Advanced Mode.

Showing the option in Settings to Enable Advanced Mode.

This unlocked a ton of advanced functionality on the site, including some things you need:

• The ability to see the permissions of an account.

• The ability to see the proposals created by an account.

• The ability to see the authorities an account is a part of.

• The ability to log in and propose transactions as a multisig account.

Creating Proposals

In order to create proposals for a multisig account, you first need to:

1. Be logged in as an account that can perform actions alone (not a multisig account)

2. Be logged in as an account that’s part of a multisig permission on another account

If both are true, then you’ll be able to use the features described below.

I’m not going to get into how to set up a multisig account or its permissions in this post. It’s assumed the multisig account is already setup and your account is included as a participant. If there’s interest, a future article could be written that covers this.

The account you’re logged in as now will be the proposer of any multisig proposals you create. This account will also cover RAM costs for proposal storage.

While logged in as your proposer account, visiting the My Account page will now have a section called Authority. This page finds all of the multisig accounts that you’re a part of.

Showing the test.gm account and its 1-of-2 authority over the msig.gm account.

Each individual multisig account your account has permission to will be listed. From here you’ll be able to click the Login as … buttons to log in as that multisig account.

Showing the msig.gm account being logged in on Unicove as an multisig account.

The entire application now treats you as if you were logged in as that multisig account.

If you attempt to perform a transaction, the user experience will be identical to that of a normal user - however, every transaction will result in a multisig proposal being created by your proposer account. Your normal wallet you use with the proposer will ask you to approve the creation of the multisig proposal.

Once signed, the normal success screen contains extra info about the new proposal.

Showing a successfully created multisig proposal.

It provides a direct link to view the proposal as well as some brief instructions. The proposal is now also visible under the Proposals section of the proposers account.

Visiting the Proposals section of the test.gm account, displaying the active proposals it has created. Clicking the proposal ID will display the proposal.

This proposal can now be signed by the parties that are part of the multisig account and then executed after the threshold has been reached.

Future multisig capabilities

This feature on Unicove is one of those things we built because we (the technical people) needed it. We didn’t put a lot of emphasis on marketing these features because of that.

The multisig system is capable of serving the everyday user, but will require investing more time into the user experience to make it easier and less error-prone. To truly make the experience easy enough for the everyday user we will need things like:

• Add a “Getting Started” path to configure a new multisig account and configure it with the appropriate participants and weights.

• Add a section to help find proposals that are requesting your approval. This is a bit tricky both due to the available APIs and potentially malicious proposals.

We know this system still requires a lot more work to refine into a feature that anyone can use. If you’ve got ideas, maybe it’s something we haven’t considered yet so I’d love to hear them. Any and all feedback welcome - including about the random things I write about 😉

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