A Safety Layer for High-Stakes Crypto Sends

Crypto transactions are unforgiving by default. One bad send can mean permanent losses.

That’s a problem the SRC CO team, the indie devs behind Nani (local crypto agents), Multisig (vaults + embedded timelocks), and zFi (a DeFi suite), are targeting with their newest tool release, called SLOW.

Of course, having control of your own money is one of the main advantages of crypto, but the unforgiving nature of crypto transfers can occasionally feel like a bug not a feature. While basic defensive practices are key, we're continuing to see tools that are playing around in the design space of augmenting your personal protections.

Let's take a closer look at SLOW, which offers reversible Ethereum payments.

Now, by reversible, this doesn't mean clawing back funds after they've been received by someone else. It means setting up a grace period, e.g. 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, etc., during which your transaction is delayed and thus cancellable at any point before the expiry.

Configuring this sort of transaction delay logic is exactly what SLOW streamlines.

The SLOW system works like so:

1. Your transfer becomes a claim in a holding smart contract.
2. An ERC-1155 receipt is minted to your recipient to represent the claim.
3. During the delay window you selected, you can reverse your transfer if/whenever you want.
4. Otherwise once the delay deadline passes, the recipient can claim the funds within 30 days.
5. If the recipient doesn't claim within 30 days, you can claw the funds back to your own address.

The whole process is done without intermediaries, and the underlying contract does all the holding. Will something like this revolutionize crypto security? Maybe not, but that's not its scope. It's a decentralized opt-in tool for adding a little more safety cushion to the transfers that matter most to you.

In this sense, SLOW may be very niche, but it's a cool option to have if it meets the needs of your particular use case.

If you want to try this mechanism, you have a few avenues to choose from, namely SLOW's fully onchain HTML frontend, the IPFS-based slow.wei.is site, or the zFi app's "Send" tab. The HTML and IPFS frontends support ETH, BOLD, USDC, and USDT sends natively (plus the ability to add custom tokens), while zFi supports a range of coins out of the gate and adding whatever you want.

For example, in the screenshot above via zFi, you can see a sample transaction teed up to Vitalik: To configure a SLOW delay here, just click the "Delayed Transfer" tab, after which you can choose from the preset time options or set up your own custom delay. Then press "Send via SLOW," complete the transaction with your wallet, and you'll be in action. If you decide to reverse your transaction later while the delay is still live, just scroll down zFi's Send page to the "Delayed Transfers" section to find and cancel your transfer.

For now, SLOW is still a beta release, so expect more updates to come. At launch, it's a clever new safety net that comes at a time when crypto can use all the defensive experiments it can get. It's certainly not necessary for every transaction, but it's a tool to bookmark and consider.