Lit is the most ambitious design in this set: key authority defined in smart contracts, enforced by a sealed TEE that reads the chain on every request, and programmable conditions in JavaScript. Vincent layers agent delegation on top. Coldstar is the least ambitious: a file, an offline machine, and a short rule list.
Lit for cross-chain conditional signing in a product; Coldstar for the treasury root and the agents that spend your own funds.
| Coldstar | Lit Protocol | |
|---|---|---|
| Who holds the root key | You. The cold root lives encrypted on your own USB drive. No vendor holds a key, a share, or an account. | Lit's network. Current docs: key authority lives in contracts on Base; a sealed TEE reads them on every request; nothing off-chain, including Lit, can sign outside the on-chain rules. Solana historically via Wrapped Keys: threshold-encrypted Ed25519 keys decrypted inside a Lit Action, and exportable. |
| Where the key lives | On your machine. The air-gapped root signs a bounded policy envelope; a disposable session key signs routine transactions inside it. | Attested TEE (Dstack stack); wrapped keys are encrypted blobs decrypted in-enclave. Whether PKPs are MPC-sharded across nodes or single-enclave was not stated on the fetched page. |
| Policy engine | Per-transaction limit, daily cap, program allowlist, recipient allowlist and blocklist, escalate-above threshold. Evaluated locally, first match wins, before any signature exists. | Lit Actions: JavaScript conditions evaluated in the TEE, gated by on-chain scopes. Vincent adds Policies as guardrails on Abilities plus an on-chain app registry. |
| Out-of-policy transactions | ESCALATE to a human over air-gapped QR, or REJECT. No signature is produced for a rejected transaction. | Signature refused by the enclave. Vincent's Connect Page handles grant-time user approval; per-transaction human escalation not documented. |
| Cold / offline root | Yes — the root key never touches a networked machine. | No. Root of trust is on-chain plus TEE; self-hosting of nodes is documented. |
| Agent integration | Framework-agnostic: the agent proposes an unsigned transaction, the signer decides. CLI signer today; MCP server in progress. | Vincent: open framework for user-controlled agents and vaults, with delegated permissions. |
| Solana support | Solana mainnet. Core is chain-agnostic; EVM signing exists. | Yes via Wrapped Keys and Sign-in-with-Solana; Vincent claims Solana, EVM, Bitcoin (its docs site was unreachable during review). |
| Source & self-hosting | Open source (MIT), self-hosted. No API key, no SaaS dependency, nothing to go down. | Core (API server, Actions runtime, contracts) published; TEE stack is Dstack; JS SDK MIT; crypto libraries Apache-2.0. Vincent repo showed no licence to GitHub's API. |
| Pricing | Free software plus a ~$10 drive. | Credit-based: $0.01 per second of management calls and Action execution, roughly $0.01 per signature; packages from $5; token discount; reads free. |
| Maturity | Beta — the signing core and policy engine are in scope for the planned independent audit. | Production network; current architecture ("Chain Secured") is recent. |
Lit's model is elegant and it is a lot of moving parts: a chain, a TEE, a JavaScript runtime, and for Solana an encrypted key inside all of it. Coldstar has three parts and you can hold all of them.
Lit asks you to trust a sealed TEE that reads authority from contracts on Base, the correctness of the Lit Action code that expresses your conditions, and for Solana the wrapped-key path where an Ed25519 secret is decrypted inside the enclave to sign. The upside is that rules are on-chain and the network is decentralised. The downside is surface area.
Coldstar asks you to trust an encrypted file, an offline machine, and a short rule list evaluated locally. The agent holds a disposable session key; the root never goes online; anything over threshold waits for a human over QR.
Lit is a production network. Coldstar is beta, pre-audit.
Lit's current docs say no off-chain party, including Lit, can make a key sign outside the on-chain rules. The key material still lives inside Lit's TEE network. Coldstar's root lives on your drive.
Through Wrapped Keys: an Ed25519 key that is threshold-encrypted and decrypted inside a Lit Action to sign, and that can be exported. Vincent also claims Solana support; its documentation site refused connections during our review.
No. Coldstar's policy is amounts, program and recipient lists, an escalate threshold, and a daily cap. If you need arbitrary conditions, Lit or Cubist are the tools.
Open source, MIT. macOS, Linux, Windows — and on the Solana Seeker dApp Store.
pip install coldstar
Third-party facts were checked against the vendor's own pages on the date above. Pricing and feature sets change; if something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it.