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ACCOUNT ABSTRACTION - “THE MERGE” FOR WALLET AND SMART CONTRACT

One of the latest developments making the rounds in the Ethereum community is the concept of “account abstraction.” Although it might sound technical, it’s about making the Ethereum blockchain more flexible and user-friendly.

So, what actually is it?

What is account abstraction?

Normally, users interact with Ethereum using an externally-owned account (EOA) or contract account associated with one unique private key.

Account abstraction provides users with increased granularity of control. This may involve the necessity for multiple signatures to initiate a transaction, enabling the option for social recovery, or imposing limitations on the smart contracts that the user's account is permitted to engage with.

To note that, account abstraction itself does not change the consensus mechanism of the Ethereum blockchain. Instead, it introduces a new way for users to interact with the blockchain.

Why should Account abstraction be deployed?

Account abstraction isn’t just a technical novelty — it has real benefits for users of the Ethereum blockchain. Some are described as below:

Flexibility:

Currently, users must pay gas fees in $ETH in every transaction on the Ethereum blockchain.

However, account abstraction could allow users to pay gas fees in other tokens. This could be particularly useful for users who hold a significant amount of a particular ERC-20 token and want to use it to interact with a specific DApp or platform without having to acquire the native token for gas payment first.

Ease of use:

With traditional Ethereum accounts, any transaction the user signs is what occurs, and there is no way to restrict anything. There are numerous examples of users unknowingly interacting with malicious smart contracts and losing their assets.

With an “Account” contract, there can be any logic to control smart contract interactions. This could open up the world of decentralized applications (DApps) to a much broader audience and with improved user experience.

Social Recovery

The private key associated with the EOA address represents a single point of failure. If a user loses his or her private key, here is no way to recover the private key.

Account abstraction enables social recovery that mitigates this risk. Like the “forget password” functionality in web2 applications, “social recovery” greatly reduces the risk of a user being permanently locked out of his or her account.

The projects building in this sector

A total of 18 teams have already begun building a variety of projects focused on ERC-4337. Some are listed below:

ZeroDev

The @zerodev_appteam is working on Kernel, a smart contract account designed from the ground up to be gas optimized and extendible with plugins

Etherspot

@etherspot is working closely with the ERC-4337 team to spearhead the protocol specification for the shared mempool and is piloting its implementation through its own bundler Skandha

Blocto

@BloctoApp keeps on improving the application layer and the developer experience, by supplementing web3.js and ethers.js to natively support AA-specific functionality

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