> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.crossmint.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Why Smart Contract Wallets > Why Crossmint chose smart contract wallets as the foundation for its wallet infrastructure. **You are viewing docs for the previous version of the Wallets SDK.** We recommend upgrading to V1. See the [updated version of this page](/wallets/why-smart-wallets) or the [V1 migration guide](/wallets/guides/migrate-to-v1). We believe wallets are becoming a foundational primitive for the entire economy — not just for crypto users, but for every person, company, AI agent, and connected device that needs to hold value or authorize payments. At that scale, wallet infrastructure must be extremely cheap to operate, flexible enough to support any custody model, and publicly auditable so that security is a matter of proof, not trust. ## The Problem with Off-Chain Key Storage Most wallet infrastructure today stores keys off-chain, inside proprietary enclaves or distributed across MPC networks. This means: * **Provider dependency**: Wallets depend on a specific provider's infrastructure to function. * **Latency overhead**: Key reconstruction adds latency to every signature. * **Painful migration**: Moving to a new provider means exporting keys and creating new wallet addresses. These are reasonable trade-offs for certain use cases — but they are not the right foundation for millions of wallets transacting continuously. ## A Different Approach Smart contract wallets take a different approach. The wallet is a program deployed on a public blockchain — it does not live in anyone's private infrastructure. The signer is completely separate and can be anything: a passkey on a user's phone, an AWS KMS key in your cloud, or a recovery credential. The key stays whole. No splitting, no reconstruction, no added latency. * **Security** is not a promise — it is code you can read. * **Recovery** is not a key-share coordination problem — it is an onchain signer rotation. * **Migration** is not an export — it is a signer swap. ## Why We Chose This Architecture We chose this architecture because it is the only one that scales to the future we are building toward: **wallets as ubiquitous and permanent as email addresses, but programmable, auditable, and owned by no one except the people and systems that use them.** See how the dual-layer architecture works in practice. Explore the signer types that plug into this architecture.