Using smart wallets

Once you have configured smart wallets in the Privy Dashboard, you can use them in your application with just a few lines of code.

Setup

1. Set up your build configuration

Integrating smart wallets in Expo requires that your app:

• uses an expo development build.
• has a custom metro.config.js file to customize the Metro bundler settings
• enables package exports for the Metro bundler:
• uses the bundler setting for Typescript's moduleResolution

To enable package exports for metro, update your metro.config.js like so:

//...other config logic

// Enable package exports for select libraries
...
const resolveRequestWithPackageExports = (context, moduleName, platform) => {
  if (moduleName.startsWith('@privy-io/')) {
    const ctx = {
      ...context,
      unstable_enablePackageExports: true,
    };
    return ctx.resolveRequest(ctx, moduleName, platform);
  }

  return context.resolveRequest(context, moduleName, platform);
};

config.resolver.resolveRequest = resolveRequestWithPackageExports;

...
module.exports = config;

Also configure your tsconfig.json like so:

{
  "extends": "expo/tsconfig.base",
  "compilerOptions": {
    "strict": true,
    // Allows us to use conditional/deep imports on published packages
    "moduleResolution": "Bundler"
  }
}

2. Install peer dependencies

npx expo install viem permissionless

3. Import and wrap your app with the SmartWalletsProvider

The SmartWalletsProvider must wrap any component or page that will use smart wallets. We recommend rendering it as close to the root of your application as possible, nested within your PrivyProvider.

import { PrivyProvider } from "@privy-io/expo";
import { SmartWalletsProvider } from "@privy-io/expo/smart-wallets";

export default function Providers({children}: {children: React.ReactNode}) {
  return (
    <PrivyProvider
      appId={Constants.expoConfig?.extra?.privyAppId}
      clientId={Constants.expoConfig?.extra?.privyAppClientId}
    >
      <SmartWalletsProvider>
        {children}
      </SmartWalletsProvider>
    </PrivyProvider>
  );
}

Creating smart wallets

Once the SmartWalletsProvider component is rendered and a smart wallet configuration has been set up for your app in the Dashboard, Privy will automatically generate smart wallets for your users once they have an embedded wallet. The embedded wallet is used as the primary signer controlling the smart wallet.

You can configure your app to create embedded wallets manually; smart wallets will be created following the same configuration.

Getting the address

Once a smart wallet has been created for a user, you can get the address for the smart wallet by finding the account of type: 'smart_wallet' from the user's linked_accounts array, and inspecting the entry's address field like so:

const {user} = usePrivy();
const smartWallet = user.linked_accounts.find((account) => account.type === 'smart_wallet');
console.log(smartWallet.address);
// Logs the smart wallet's address
console.log(smartWallet.type);
// Logs the smart wallet type (e.g. 'safe', 'kernel', 'light_account', 'biconomy')

Signatures and transactions

To use the smart wallet to sign messages and send transactions, import the useSmartWallets hook and use the client returned by the hook. This client is a drop-in replacement for a viem WalletClient and supports many of the same methods, including signMessage, signTypedData, and sendTransaction.

import {useSmartWallets} from '@privy-io/expo/smart-wallets';
...
const {client} = useSmartWallets();

Signing messages

To sign messages with the smart wallet, simply call the client's signMessage or signTypedData method like so:

const {client} = useSmartWallets();
const signature = await client.signMessage({
  account: client.account,
  message: 'Hello world',
});

Sending transactions

To send transactions with the smart wallet, call the client's sendTransaction method with your desired transaction request. If your app has a paymaster URL registered in the Dashboard, Privy will automatically use that paymaster to attempt to sponsor the gas fees for the user's transaction.

const {client} = useSmartWallets();
const txHash = await client.sendTransaction({
  account: client.account,
  chain: base,
  to: 'insert-recipient-address',
  value: 0.1,
});

Batching transactions

Smart wallets support sending a batch of transactions in a single, atomic submission to the network.

To send a batched transactions with a smart wallet, call the client's sendTransaction method with a calls array the transactions to batch together. Each call may have the following fields:

Field	Type	Description
to	string	The recipient of the transaction or the address of the smart contract being called.
value	bigint	The value in wei for the transaction.
data	string	Encoded calldata for the transaction, if calling a smart contract. We suggest using viem's encodeFunctionData to prepare this value.

As an example, you might batch together a transaction to approve a USDC spender and to transfer USDC like so:

const {client} = useSmartWallets();
const txHash = await client.sendTransaction({
  account: client.account,
  calls: [
    // Approve transaction
    {
      to: USDC_ADDRESS,
      data: encodeFunctionData({
        abi: USDC_ABI,
        functionName: 'approve',
        args: ['insert-spender-address', BigInt(1e6)],
      }),
    },
    // Transfer transaction
    {
      to: USDC_ADDRESS,
      data: encodeFunctionData({
        abi: USDC_ABI,
        functionName: 'transfer',
        args: ['insert-recipient-address', BigInt(1e6)],
      }),
    },
  ],
});

TIP

The smart wallet client will default to using the first configured chain that has a smart wallet network configuration.