How Sequence Makes Non-Custodial Smart Wallets Practical for Production Payments

Wallet infrastructure is one of the biggest blockers for institutions to ship stablecoin and onchain payment products. Production wallets must handle secure authentication, recovery, permissions, and compliance friendly controls without turning every user action into a signing workflow. 

Sequence solves this by delivering a non-custodial smart wallet solution designed for ecosystems and apps, with passkeys, social auth, timed recovery keys, and sandboxed permissions through Smart Sessions.

With the recent acquisition of Sequence by Polygon Labs, there’s now a robust, enterprise-grade wallet offering, in conjunction with widely-adopted, highly-efficient blockchain rails. To enable seamless end-to-end money movement with stablecoins, from offchain systems to onchain settlement, and back again, Polygon is building a single, integrated API in the Open Money Stack.

Together, Sequence and Polygon reduce wallet integration risk and make it simple to launch payments experiences that feel familiar to end users and operations teams.

The Problem: Account Fragmentation Is a Bottleneck

Stablecoins settle instantly on blockchain rails. But most onchain accounts are not designed for production payments. In practice, wallets are used as if they were bank accounts. They hold balances, authorize spending, recover access, and define who can do what. 

Traditional wallets were built for asset custody, not for operational money movement.

For payments teams, this creates three hard blockers:

1. Authority is all-or-nothing: A single private key controls everything. Any attempt to reduce friction, automate actions, or delegate access increases risk without clear boundaries.

2. Recovery is unsafe or unusable: Simple recovery paths create silent takeover risk. Strong recovery processes create user friction, support tickets, and failed transactions.

3. Operations teams can’t reason about control: There is no clear way to explain or audit who can move funds, under what conditions, for how long, and with what limits. That makes compliance, security review, and incident response extremely difficult.

The common custodial versus non-custodial framing does not solve this. Enterprises do not care about ideology. They care about predictable control, recoverability, and security properties that can be explained and verified.

In practice, wallet infrastructure becomes the gating factor that prevents payments products from moving from pilot to production.

The Solution: Sequence, Acquired by Polygon

Sequence Ecosystem Wallet is a non-custodial smart wallet built for chains, ecosystems, and apps. It combines passkeys, social auth, timed recovery keys, and sandboxed permissions to deliver payments-grade security with minimal friction.

Sequence Ecosystem Wallet is designed to solve the requirements that matter most for real-world payments and financial experiences. 

1) One address per user across apps and chains: Sequence reduces account fragmentation by giving each user a single, consistent wallet address across apps and chains. This eliminates a common operational issue where users end up with multiple accounts, stranded balances, and inconsistent inventory depending on where they logged in.

2) Smart Sessions with sandboxed, per-app permissions: Smart Sessions isolate permissions at the application level, allowing each app to operate within clearly defined boundaries. The result is fewer signatures and fewer disruptive prompts, without granting an app broad or opaque authority. Instead of a series of unclear approvals, users approve a session with explicit limits. This gives product teams a practical way to implement policies like spend limits, timeouts, and contract-scoped interactions.

3) Built-in recovery and enterprise-grade security controls: Timed recovery keys provide time-based recovery, which matters for payments experiences where silent takeover is unacceptable. Sequence also emphasizes hardware isolated signing and publicly verifiable attestations for deployments, which is aligned with what enterprise security teams expect when they evaluate production-grade infrastructure.

For developers, Sequence reduces integration surface area by providing SDKs across Web, Mobile, Unity, and Unreal, and by handling core flows like auth, session management, and transactions as part of the same system. For ecosystems, Sequence supports branded wallets on the ecosystem’s domain, hosted or fully custom, with admin controls for chains, branding, session policies, and app or domain restrictions. Additionally, ecosystems powered by Sequence wallet solutions can integrate any app in minutes, not months.

This is why Sequence provides wallet infrastructure with a clear model for identity, permissions, security, and operations.

Why Polygon

Wallet abstraction only works if the settlement layer is fast, cheap, and predictable.

Payments products depend on consistent behavior. If transaction confirmation is slow, fees are unpredictable, or finality is uncertain, the wallet experience collapses into retries, customer support, and conservative limits that break product UX.

Polygon is built for this kind of workload. Low transaction costs and fast finality make it feasible to support account-like interactions, frequent micro actions, and operational patterns like retries and batched execution without turning each event into a cost decision. For Sequence, Polygon’s reliability makes Smart Sessions and cross-chain behavior feel like a product feature.

Polygon’s role here is to be boring infrastructure simply works.

Results and Outcomes

The combined effect of Sequence and Polygon is operational and product driven.

• Faster time to market: teams integrate a production wallet surface with ready made auth, sessions, and recovery patterns, instead of building and stitching.
• Lower operational complexity: a consistent identity model and wallet behavior reduces account fragmentation, stranded balances, and corridor by corridor exceptions.
• Better end user UX: passkeys, social auth, and fewer signature prompts make the experience feel closer to modern fintech apps.
• Easier expansion across chains and regions: cross chain by default behavior and ecosystem level configuration reduce the cost of adding new environments.

These are the conditions required to run payments in production.

Strategic Implications

For fintechs launching global wallets: Sequence turns “wallet” into an account layer that can support real onboarding and recovery patterns. That helps teams ship stablecoin custody and spending experiences without forcing end users to learn crypto behaviors.

For payment platforms embedding stablecoins: Smart Sessions and sandboxed permissions enable low friction flows while preserving non-custodial guarantees. This is a practical way to offer stablecoin rails without asking users to approve every step of a payment or payout flow.

For enterprises that want blockchain without exposing users to it: Sequence provides a wallet system that can be branded, governed, and operated with policies that resemble enterprise controls. That is a prerequisite for using blockchain settlement as infrastructure rather than as a product identity.

This ties directly into the Open Money Stack. Wallets are the user facing layer that makes stablecoin settlement usable. If wallets behave like consumer finance accounts, the rest of the stack can finally deliver end to end money movement.

Closing: Why This Matters Now

Wallet abstraction is now table stakes. Users will not tolerate seed phrases, constant approvals, or fragmented identities across apps and chains.

At the same time, payments infrastructure is converging toward fewer, more reliable systems. The market is moving away from stitching together point solutions and toward integrated primitives that reduce operational risk.

Sequence on Polygon represents a structural shift because it replaces wallet assembly with a coherent model for identity, permissions, recovery, and security, running on predictable settlement rails. For teams building payments, that is the difference between a wallet being a blocker and a wallet being enterprise-grade infrastructure.

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