Overview
Sail Protocol is a minimal account-abstraction primitive for onchain separately managed accounts (SMAs), implemented for the EVM. It wraps a Safe smart account with a permission-gating layer so that a designated manager — typically an autonomous agent — can execute transactions on the account's behalf, but only within bounds the account owner has authorized on-chain.
The problem
A separately managed account is the structure professional asset management is built on: capital is titled to the owner, a manager executes within a mandate, and the mandate can be narrowed or revoked at any time. DeFi never reproduced it. Three gaps:
Pooled vaults give up custody and attribution. Depositors mint shares of a single strategy, surrender account-level custody, and inherit the strategy's full risk profile shared across every other depositor.
Smart wallets have no mandate. Self-custodial wallets preserve custody but have no native concept of a manager bounded by enforceable rules.
Agents need signing authority and enforceable bounds. An autonomous agent managing capital must be able to transact continuously, yet must be constrained by something stronger than a prompt.
Sail fills the gap between them: a self-custodial account whose manager has bounded, code-enforced, revocable authority.
How it works
Capital is held in the owner's Safe. The kernel never holds assets.
The mandate is not a document — it is the set of permission contracts registered for the account.
On each dispatch the manager's signature names one registered permission. The kernel evaluates only that permission, via
staticcallunder a fixed gas cap, and forwards the call to the Safe only if it returnstrue.Because permissions are arbitrary Solidity, any DeFi primitive can be expressed as a permission. Adding a new venue is a contract deployment, not a protocol upgrade.
What's in the trusted core
SailKernel
Account registration, permission registry, EIP-712 signature verification, manager dispatch (single & batch), fee accounting, principal tracking. The only trusted execution surface.
SailGovernance
Parameter store behind a 48-hour timelock: constitutional caps, the protocol cut, the registration fee, and the trusted Safe/fee-policy allowlists. Emergency pause with auto-expiry.
TimelockController
Standalone OpenZeppelin timelock (48h), deployed separately and injected into SailGovernance, which validates it at construction.
MandateFactory
UX orchestrator bundling configure → register into one transaction. Holds no privilege; every inner call is independently signature-authenticated.
SafeModuleEnabler
Stateless one-shot helper that enables the kernel as a Safe module during account creation.
StandardFeePolicy
Reference fee policy: management fee on AUM plus a performance fee above a per-account high-water mark.
Permission templates and fee policies live outside the trusted core. A bug in a template affects only the accounts that registered it.
Where to go next
New to the model? Start with Concepts.
Want the component-level picture? See Architecture.
Building a permission? Jump to the Permission system and Guides.
Need addresses or signatures? See Reference.
The trusted core and shared templates are deployed on 11 chains (9 mainnets + 2 testnets) and were reviewed by Octane, an AI source-code security scanner, across three analyses. A security review is not a proof of correctness — do not use with funds you are not prepared to lose.
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