Privy resources, such as wallets and policies, are controlled or managed by a user, an authorization key, or a key quorum. These are known as owners and signers. At a high-level, owners control wallets and the policies applied to them, while additional signers can take actions with a wallet within the scope of certain policies applied to them. Privy also enables custom configurations of owners and signers, so that you can configure different parties to have different permissions over resources. You can additionally update these configurations over time, given authorization from an existing owner, allowing you to update controls over resources as needed. Learn more about the differences betweens owners and signers and the three types of owners and signers.

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Owners

Generally, owners have full control over a resource in the Privy API. Once assigned to a resource, owners have the ability to update that resource. Owners can also update the owner for a resource they control, enabling transfer of control over resources. With wallets, owners have the ability to:
  • sign and transact with the wallet (within the scope of the wallet’s policies)
  • update the policies assigned to a wallet
  • update the additional signers assigned to the wallet, and the policies assigned to each signer
  • update the owner of the wallet
  • export the wallet’s private key
  • delete the wallet
With policies, owners have the ability to:
  • update the rules of the policy
  • update the owner of the policy
  • delete the policy

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Signers

Signers, or additional signers, are parties that are given scoped permissions to take actions with a wallet. Signers on a wallet enable use cases like:
  • Taking offline actions on behalf of a user, such as limit orders, agentic trading, and portfolio rebalancing
  • Giving scoped permissions to a third-party to take actions on behalf of a wallet
A wallet’s owner can add or remove signers on the wallet, and assign policies to each signer to restrict the actions they can take. Signers cannot update a wallet’s owner, signers, or policies and cannot export the wallet’s private key. They can only take actions (signatures tand transactions) with the wallet subject to their policies.

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Types

Learn more about three types of owners and signers: users, authorization keys, and key quorums.

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Permissions

Owners and signers have different permissions over wallets, as outlined below.
OwnersSigners
Sign messages✅✅
Send transactions✅✅
Update policies✅❌
Update owners✅❌
Update signers✅❌
Export wallet✅❌
Can be configured with policies✅✅