Request: Access Public Key & Generic Signing via Argent Web Wallet Connector

[G9NCUE]

Project: starknetkit (via WebWalletConnector)

Context:

Hi StarknetKit / Argent team,

We’re building a dApp using @starknet-react/core and starknetkit, where users connect via Argent Web Wallet to initiate transactions handled by a backend API.

After connection, we fetch address, balances, and transaction history via our backend API (Adamik).

(Screenshots attached)

• Before connection: UI shows “Connect Wallet”

• After connection: UI shows connected address, balances, transaction history

Problem:

We face two related challenges when interacting with our backend API (Adamik) for users connected via Argent Web Wallet:

1. Account Deployment requires Public Key: When a user initiates their first transaction, if their account isn’t deployed, our backend requires the senderPubKey to trigger deployment (mode: "deployAccount"). However, we’re unable to retrieve the public key after connection:

   • useAccount() from @starknet-react/core gives us the address.
   • Trying account.signer.getPubKey() throws an error (expected valid private key..., got 0). We assume this is because the signer from Argent Web Wallet does not expose a private key to the frontend.

2. Signing Backend-Encoded Transactions: Our backend API provides fully encoded transactions (including the deployment transaction mentioned above, and subsequent transfers) as a hex string or structured data. We need a way for the connected Argent Web Wallet user to sign this specific, pre-encoded transaction payload provided by our backend, rather than relying solely on higher-level frontend functions like account.execute which re-encode the transaction details.

Request:

Could you please advise on the recommended approach for these scenarios?

1. Public Key Access: Is there a way to retrieve the public key from the connected account via starknetkit or @starknet-react/core when using the WebWalletConnector before the first transaction? If not, could this be exposed (read-only)? This is critical for initiating deployment via backend APIs as we use the pubkey as salt.

2. Generic Signing: Is there a method exposed by the WebWalletConnector or the account object to request a signature for an arbitrary, pre-encoded transaction hash/payload (like the one returned by our backend's /encode endpoint)?

Supporting these two capabilities (accessing the pubKey upfront and signing pre-encoded transactions) would greatly facilitate integration with backend services that manage transaction encoding and broadcasting, especially for handling the essential StarkNet account deployment flow.

Thanks a lot for your help!

Fabrice
(Adamik CEO)