Argent is a smart-contract wallet originally launched in 2018 by London-based Argent Labs, designed to replace seed phrases with onchain features like social recovery, daily transfer limits, and trusted contacts. The wallet ships in two product lines: Argent X, a browser extension for Starknet, and Argent Mobile, a multi-chain mobile wallet supporting Ethereum and several Layer 2 networks. Argent helped shape the account abstraction conversation years before ERC-4337 was finalized, and its team contributed to Starknet's native AA design at the protocol level.
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Argent is a non-custodial smart-contract wallet, meaning each user's account is a deployed contract on a blockchain rather than an externally owned account (EOA) controlled by a private key. The contract holds the user's funds and enforces rules like daily limits, guardian approvals, and trusted contact whitelists. Argent Labs, the company behind the wallet, has been operating since 2018 and was one of the first teams to ship smart-contract wallets to retail users.
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Argent supports two distinct products as of 2026:

Argent also operates Argent Multisig, a multi-signature wallet product targeted at teams, DAOs, and treasuries on Starknet. The multisig is also a smart contract and uses guardian and threshold logic similar to the consumer wallet.
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Argent replaces the seed phrase with a combination of an onchain contract account and offchain key management. The user's device holds a session key or owner key, and the smart contract enforces additional rules like guardian approvals and transfer limits. If the device is lost, the user can recover the account through guardians without ever holding a 12-word backup.
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The mechanism varies by chain:
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Starknet does not have EOAs. Every account on Starknet is a contract, and every transaction is a contract call. This is what "native AA" means in practice: the protocol does not distinguish between user accounts and smart contracts at the transaction level. Argent X accounts on Starknet are Cairo contracts that the user deploys on first use, and the contract handles signature verification, nonce management, and fee payment internally.
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Argent X uses a standard signature scheme based on Starknet's STARK-friendly curve, and the contract supports upgrades through a proxy pattern documented in Argent's open-source repositories. The protocol-level AA design on Starknet was shaped in part by input from Argent and StarkWare engineers during Starknet's 2021-2022 development.
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On Ethereum mainnet and EVM Layer 2s, Argent Mobile uses ERC-4337, the account abstraction standard finalized in March 2023. Under ERC-4337, the Argent smart account is a contract that exposes a validateUserOp function. Users submit signed UserOperations to a bundler, which packages them and submits a single transaction to the EntryPoint contract at the canonical address shared across chains. The EntryPoint validates and executes each UserOp against the user's account.
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Argent's ERC-4337 account contract enforces the same guardian and limit logic as the Starknet version, adapted to Solidity. Gas payment can be sponsored through a paymaster, allowing apps to cover fees on behalf of users.
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Guardians are a core Argent feature. A guardian is an address (another wallet, a friend's wallet, or a hardware key) that the smart contract recognizes as authorized to approve recovery. If the user loses access to their primary device, a quorum of guardians can co-sign a recovery transaction that rotates the owner key to a new device. There is a security delay built into the recovery flow, typically several days, during which the original owner can cancel the recovery if it was unauthorized. The delay and threshold are documented in Argent's product docs and contract code.
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The Daily Transfer Limit caps how much value can leave the wallet in a 24-hour window without guardian co-signing. Transfers above the limit either fail or queue for guardian approval, depending on configuration. Trusted Contacts is a separate allowlist: addresses on the list bypass the limit, so users can move funds freely between their own wallets or to a known counterparty.
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Both features execute as contract logic, not as offchain warnings. A drained owner key cannot move more than the daily limit to a non-trusted address without guardian co-signs, which is the property that makes the wallet resistant to phishing and key theft.
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The two Argent products serve different user surfaces and run on different account abstraction stacks.
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Argent X targets Starknet power users who interact with dapps from a desktop browser. The extension supports Starknet's native AA, dapp connect via the Starknet wallet API, and signing of Cairo-based transactions. Argent X is the default wallet for most Starknet dapps as of 2026 and is documented in StarkWare's developer resources.
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Argent Mobile supports Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, and Starknet within a single mobile app. The mobile app uses ERC-4337 contracts on EVM chains and Starknet's native AA contracts on Starknet, with a unified UI for users. Argent Mobile is the more general-purpose product and the entry point Argent points new users to as of 2026.
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Argent Multisig is a Starknet-native multi-signature product for teams and treasuries. Threshold and signer set are configured at deployment, and the contract supports the same upgrade and recovery patterns as the consumer wallet. Argent Multisig is positioned as a Starknet-native alternative to Safe for teams operating primarily on Starknet rollups.
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The recovery flow is the most distinctive piece of the Argent UX, since it replaces the seed-phrase backup that EOA wallets like MetaMask require.

The recovery flow is purely onchain, which means it works without Argent Labs as an intermediary. If Argent Labs disappeared tomorrow, users with self-selected guardians could still recover their accounts by interacting directly with the deployed contracts.
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Argent's wallet contracts have been audited multiple times since the initial launch, and Argent publishes audit reports on its GitHub and developer documentation. Audits have been conducted by firms including ConsenSys Diligence, OpenZeppelin, and Trail of Bits across the various contract versions, with reports available in Argent's public repositories.
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Argent's mainnet contracts are upgradable through a proxy pattern. This is a deliberate design choice that lets Argent ship bug fixes and feature additions without forcing users to migrate to new account addresses. Upgrades require either user consent or a security delay similar to recovery, depending on the contract version. Major upgrades shipped in 2020, 2021, and 2023 are documented in Argent's release notes.
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Upgradability is a trade-off. Compared to immutable contract wallets like the early versions of Coinbase Smart Wallet, Argent users rely on the deployed proxy logic and the upgrade governance to remain non-malicious. Argent's response is that the proxy is well-audited, upgrades require time delays and user opt-in for non-emergency changes, and the alternative (no upgrades) would have prevented the security improvements shipped since 2018.
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The three wallets are often compared as the leading smart-account products as of 2026, but they target different users and different recovery models.
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Argent is a consumer wallet with onchain social recovery, daily limits, and trusted contacts. It targets individual retail users and supports Starknet plus EVM Layer 2s. The recovery model relies on guardians chosen by the user. Argent Mobile is the consumer surface; Argent Multisig is the team surface, scoped to Starknet.
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Coinbase Smart Wallet, launched in June 2024, is a passkey-based smart-contract wallet built on ERC-4337 and deployed across Coinbase's supported EVM chains. There is no seed phrase: the user's key is a WebAuthn passkey stored in the device secure enclave or in iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager. Recovery is via passkey backup, not via guardians. Coinbase Smart Wallet targets users who want a fast onboarding flow tied to existing device biometrics.
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Safe is a multi-signature smart-contract wallet originally launched as Gnosis Safe in 2018 and rebranded to Safe in July 2022. Safe targets teams, DAOs, and protocol treasuries. Its security model is N-of-M signatures rather than social recovery. Safe is the dominant treasury wallet in DeFi: as of 2025, Safe contracts held tens of billions of dollars in assets across Ethereum and EVM L2s per the Safe team's reporting on safe.global. Safe is less suited to individual mobile use than Argent or Coinbase Smart Wallet, since signing typically involves multiple hardware wallets.
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Argent's engineering team contributed to the design of Starknet's account model during the rollup's development. Because Starknet was built to support account abstraction at the protocol level rather than as an application-layer standard, the design of the account interface, the validation flow, and the fee model required input from wallet teams that would ship the first accounts.
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Argent X was the reference wallet for Starknet through 2021 and 2022, and the Argent X contract was used as a template for early Starknet developer documentation. As Starknet matured, additional wallets joined the ecosystem, but Argent X remained one of the two reference clients (alongside Braavos) cited in Starknet's developer hub.
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The practical effect is that Starknet's AA design choices, including how accounts pay fees, how signatures are validated, and how contracts are upgraded, reflect lessons Argent learned operating ERC-4337-style wallets on Ethereum since 2018. The native AA approach moves logic from the application layer (where ERC-4337 lives) into the protocol layer, which removes the need for separate bundler and EntryPoint infrastructure on Starknet.
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Argent shipped several notable changes between 2024 and 2025, documented in the company's blog and release notes:

The trend across 2024-2025 has been deeper standards support on EVM chains (ERC-4337, ERC-7702, ERC-7715) while Starknet's native AA continues to evolve independently. Argent's bet from 2018 (that wallets should be smart contracts) is now the default position across the industry, with the ERC-4337 finalization in March 2023 and the Pectra upgrade in May 2025 codifying the approach at the Ethereum protocol level.
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Stablecoin transfers are one of the highest-volume use cases for smart wallets. Argent's daily limits, trusted contacts, and guardian recovery map cleanly to stablecoin operations: capping daily USDC outflow, allowlisting a payroll counterparty, or recovering an account after a phone loss without ever exposing a seed phrase. For onchain payments at scale, the combination of smart-account UX (Argent, Coinbase Smart Wallet, Safe) and a cross-chain stablecoin liquidity layer is how the user-facing and infrastructure-facing parts of the stack come together.
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Eco operates the liquidity and intent-routing layer underneath stablecoin payments, moving USDC, USDT, and other stablecoins across Arbitrum, Base, Optimism, Polygon, and other supported chains. Wallets like Argent provide the account UX; Eco Routes provides the transport. Users initiating a payment from Argent Mobile to a counterparty on a different chain rely on routing infrastructure to bridge the value, and Eco's role is to make that hop fast, cheap, and predictable across more than fifteen supported chains.
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No. Argent is non-custodial. The smart-contract account is controlled by the user's owner key and (in recovery scenarios) by the guardians the user has selected. Argent Labs cannot move funds without the user's owner key or a guardian quorum.
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No. Argent uses smart-contract accounts with guardian-based recovery, which eliminates the 12-word seed phrase entirely. Users back up the account via guardians rather than via a written phrase.
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Argent Mobile supports Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, and Starknet as of 2026. Argent X supports Starknet exclusively. Argent Multisig is Starknet-native. Check Argent's website for the current list, since chain support evolves.
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The Argent wallet contracts are open source and published on the Argent GitHub organization. The mobile app and browser extension front ends are not fully open source as of 2026, but the core onchain logic, which is what holds and moves user funds, is publicly reviewable.
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MetaMask is primarily an EOA wallet, meaning the account is a private key with no onchain logic. MetaMask Smart Account, launched as part of the Pectra upgrade and ERC-7702 rollout in 2025, is the smart-contract option inside MetaMask. Argent's account has always been a smart contract; MetaMask's smart-account product is newer. The two converge on similar features (guardians, limits, session keys) but reach them from opposite starting points.
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The smart contracts that hold user funds are deployed on public blockchains and continue to operate without Argent Labs. Users with guardians they personally control can still execute recovery and move funds. Users who rely on Argent-operated guardian services would lose that option but could still recover via any other guardians they configured.
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This article references public Argent documentation, Starknet developer resources, EIP specifications, and product launch dates published by Coinbase, Safe, and the Ethereum Foundation. Specific sources include:

Numbers in this article reflect public reporting as of early 2026. Audit firm citations refer to public audit reports linked from Argent's GitHub. Active user counts and treasury values are not asserted unless directly sourced.
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