After a long time of development without updates, Account Abstraction was suddenly announced by Ethereum at the ETHDenver conference.
At the WalletCon event held within the framework of ETHDenver – the annual conference of the Ethereum community in the US – Ethereum developers suddenly announced the implementation of the ERC-4337 feature, also known as Account Abstraction. .
Ethereum developers divide the wallet accounts that users can create into two types: External Owned Accounts (EOA) and Contract Accounts (CA).
EOA are wallets that ETH users get when they register to use a non-custodial wallet service such as MetaMask, WalletConnect, Argent, Rainbow, Coin98 Wallet, etc. These wallets give the owner a public key pair ( is the public wallet address) and the private key (the password to access that wallet and initiate the transaction). However, if you lose your private key, you will lose access to your wallet.
Meanwhile, CA is a wallet controlled by programming code through smart contracts, allowing to perform many tasks at the same time and complex functions. CA is the address of DeFi smart contracts, liquidity pools, token lock/unlock contracts, etc.
Seeing the inadequacies in the process of using wallets at the present time, which is still too complicated and poses many barriers for ordinary users, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin proposed the Account Abstraction solution in June 2022.
The goal of Account Abstraction is to merge EOA and CA together, creating a wallet solution that has the advantages of the two crypto wallets above. In simple terms, Account Abstraction will turn the user’s wallet into a smart contract.
As a result, Account Abstraction will bring many useful uses for Ethereum users, such as:
- Program the wallet directly into the hardware device, opening the possibility of transaction authentication by 2FA, face scan or fingerprint scanning;
- Social recovery feature, helping to recover wallet in case of loss of private key;
- Allows paying transaction fees in tokens other than ETH;
- multisig transaction;
- Apply various algorithms to encrypt signatures;
- Remove the relayer, making the above Tornado Cash problem protect user privacy without relying on a third party;
- Use as an arbitrage tool (profit from arbitrage).
However, Account Abstraction still has some disadvantages that need to be resolved such as the need for the simplest interactive interface for the user experience, as well as the failure to optimize the problem of gas fees when transacting.
According to the announcement of the Ethereum development team at ETHDenver on the evening of March 1, Account Abstraction has been deployed to the Ethereum network. The reason ERC-4337 can be put on the blockchain so easily without requiring a network-wide upgrade is because it is an added smart contract, no need to change the programming code. This smart contract can also be deployed on other blockchains that are compatible with EVM.
“Account Abstraction brings many benefits and a new security risk…smart contract bugs.” 🐞
–@yoavw of @Ethereum Foundation giving the #WalletCon2023 Keynote pic.twitter.com/MUwJWIIIWP
— WalletCon (@WalletCon_) March 2, 2023
Ethereum revealed that many non-custodial wallet developers will announce support for Account Abstraction in the near future, starting with Safe on the evening of March 1.
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