Proxy Accounts

Polkadot allows you to setup proxy accounts that can grant limited privileges to interact with the blockchain network on-behalf of your account. This setup makes sense if you have significant funds on your hardware wallet account and would not want to plug it in for transactions on the network that do not involve moving the funds. These proxy accounts would typically be on hot wallets to allow for ease of transacting.

Proxy Types

Here are a few proxy account options available on Polkadot.

• Non-transfer Proxy - as the name suggests, can be used for all blockchain transactions except for moving funds from the original account
• Staking Proxy - for all staking related transactions
• Governance Proxy - for participating in Polkadot OpenGov, the largest DAO in existence

There is also an Any proxy account, which is fully privileged to act on behalf of your account, but you may ask why do you need such proxy? Well, that is when you need to understand the existence of the purest of all of the proxies - the Pure proxy (previously known as anonymous proxy). The pure proxy account's private key is unknown. With 'Any' permissions to this pure proxy account, you are able to fully control it, even though you do not have its private key.

Pure Proxy

Pure proxy is like a genie who is tied to the lamp. You can rub the lamp and make the genie perform all blockchain transactions. If you free the genie by breaking the lamp, you can never control him again. It is possible to transfer the power of controlling this genie from one lamp to the other. Or have multiple lamps of different levels of privileges control the genie. Hope you get the idea.

Having multisig accounts added as an Any proxy to this Pure proxy account makes life easy for organizations that have a lot of changing personnel. By keeping the Genie in charge of a lot of organizational tasks and moving him around in different lamps when the previous lamp can no longer be operated.