How Ava's smart wallet works, how it relates to your existing EOA, and what gets created when you first authorize a Guardian.
Ava operates inside a smart-contract wallet (also called a smart account) bound to your existing EOA (MetaMask, etc.). The smart wallet is what enforces the on-chain spend caps that bound what Ava can do.
You deploy a new smart wallet, fund it with the assets you want Ava to manage, and authorize a Guardian on it. Your main holdings stay in your EOA, untouched. Blast radius is bounded to what's in the smart wallet.
Best for: new users, anyone with a sizeable main wallet they don't want to mix.
You attach an Ava-controlled permission to your existing EOA via a controller — your EOA stays in MetaMask, but a bounded permission lets Ava initiate the small set of transactions you authorize. No funds move; the EOA is unchanged.
Best for: users who already have an Aave position on their main wallet and don't want to migrate.
The Telegram flow walks you through whichever fits — Ava asks; you choose.
For setup #1, a smart-wallet contract gets deployed on-chain (one-time gas cost, ~$5–15 on Base, more on Ethereum mainnet). The contract is the standard Ava Protocol smart wallet — verified, audited, source-visible on the block explorer.
For setup #2, no new wallet is deployed; a permission-bearing contract is associated with your EOA via the controller pattern, and the policy lives in a small policy contract.
In both cases, the policy contract is the thing that enforces caps. Ava is one of the actors authorized to call into it; you are the owner.
The smart wallet inherits security from your EOA. If you lose your EOA, the recovery model depends on your EOA wallet's own recovery (e.g. social recovery if you used a recovery-enabled wallet, or your seed phrase otherwise).
We do not custody a recovery path. There is no "email reset" for your wallet, by design.
Your smart wallet (and its policies) are tied to your EOA, not to Telegram. If you re-link the Guardian from a new Telegram account to the same EOA, everything resumes. Telegram is the chat surface; the wallet is the source of truth.
You can run multiple smart wallets — one per use case (positions, savings, team) is common. Each gets its own alias in Telegram and its own permissions. Studio shows them all in one view.