While the vision for Lion is large, the set of publicly available technologies regarding user wallets is limiting. The RPC is the first version of our product that fits within these constraints while still supporting the greater vision. The RPC, which stands for remote procedure call, is just a URL that a wallet uses to send transactions to the actual nodes that run the blockchain. The default RPC on Metamask is https://mainnet.infura.io/v3/ , which a user would switch to https://rpc.withlion.com to start enjoying the benefits of Lion. Once the Lion RPC is installed, the user experience won't be any different except for the small fraction of cases where a fraudulent or insecure transaction is detected. In this case, the transaction is deleted from the RPC server and the blockchain never sees it. If a user opts to connect a phone number, a confirmation text will be sent instead to double check the transaction first before dropping it.

Users take on no additional risk by using the Lion RPC. Since transactions are signed locally by a user, Lion has no custody of user funds in any way, shape, or form. The worst case scenario, for disclosure, is that a users transaction is flagged, but does not get properly dropped from the Lion server and still makes it on chain. In this case, Lion has the same operating assurance as Infura or any other RPC. We are working hard to make sure this never happens. If this is a deal breaker for you, hold out and refer to our vision in “What is Lion”, as future tech like account abstraction remove this edge case of transaction leakage.

Not at the moment. Lion is a personal project, and as such the link that a user might create between a wallet address and a phone number does risk exposing the identity of a wallet. We never plan on sharing this information. In the future, this vector can be removed entirely when we move away from the RPC product.