Proxy Accounts

Learn what proxy accounts are and how to create them

To explain what proxy accounts are, you can think of having two types of wallets: Cold Wallet holds all your money, and the other, Hot Wallet, has just enough funds for everyday needs and is more active. When you set up your Hot Wallet as a proxy, the Cold Wallet allows the Hot Wallet to handle some tasks for it, like paying fees or making certain decisions, without giving direct access to the main funds.

Proxy accounts supersede controller accounts that were used in Staking.

Proxy accounts are available starting with the Aleph Node 13.0 release.

Proxies can be created using azero.dev wallet, and other wallets like Nova Wallet.

Proxies cannot be created from the Aleph Zero Dashboard wallet.

When to use Proxy accounts

Proxy accounts are particularly useful for those who want to separate their long-term holdings (often kept in a hardware or cold wallet, with the seed phase stored securely somewhere offline), from the day-to-day operational activities like transactions, voting, or staking. Users with significant assets might prefer this setup to minimize the risk of unauthorized access to their main funds, delegating transactional responsibilities to a separate account with limited access. However, there is one major drawback to consider - complexity. Managing multiple accounts adds overhead in keeping track of your keys, and understanding the responsibilities and limitations of each account long term. Additionally, if the proxy account is compromised, there might be a risk to the funds it manages, depending on the level of permissions it was granted.

An additional, though rare, use case for Proxy accounts is to delegate some responsibility for managing your assets to other people. An example of this could be a Validator that has a dedicated person managing their nodes and validator setup, having "Staking" access to validator funds.

Creating proxy

To create a proxy account, let's assume a situation in which Proxied account is a cold wallet, and Proxy is a hot wallet. We are going to add a proxy for Proxied account. Proxied account has all the funds, whereas Proxy account has just enough tokens for transaction fees.

Open Accounts/Accounts page in azero.dev wallet
in Proxied account, click three dots right to the account name, and choose Add proxy

Click Add proxy and select Proxy account

Type can be any of

Any - proxy can call any transaction that is available on the Aleph Zero chain,
Non Transfer - like Any but excluding token transfers, e.g. vesting.vestedTransfer call
Staking - all transactions related to Staking or Nomination Pools

Note reserved balance shows the amount of AZERO tokens that will be reserved from Proxied 's free balance. In the above example, it is less than 1 AZERO.

Sign and submit the transaction. This one needs to be signed byProxied, ie the cold wallet
You can see the blue icon next to Proxied account name. If you hover over it, you can click Manage proxies to add/remove proxies for Proxied account