Smart accounts, enabled by the release of the new ERC-4337 standard, are now available on Ethereum and are expected to help mainstream adoption by finally making cryptocurrency easy to use.
Ethereum Foundation security researcher Yoav Weiss will make the surprise announcement at WalletCon in Denver today that the main contracts for ERC-4337, known to blockchain developers as “account abstraction,” have passed an audit by Open Zeppelin and will be available on every Ethereum. Virtual machine (EVM) compatible network including Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, BNB Smart Chain, Avalanche and Gnosis Chain.
New users will no longer need to learn complicated seed phrases or the technical process of setting up a wallet to get on board with the decentralized world of cryptocurrency, Weiss told Cointelegraph.
“The next billion users are not going to write 12 words on a piece of paper. Normal people don’t do that,” she said. “We need to give them better usability, they shouldn’t have to think about cryptographic keys.”
“EIP-4337 is going to take a year or whatever” – @sashaaldrick of @gelatonetwork
A big surprise awaits you
—John Rising (@johnrising_) February 25, 2023
The account abstraction also allows the unique cryptographic keys used for cryptocurrencies to be stored in standard smartphone security modules, upgrading them to de facto hardware wallets. However, the screen is still a security issue compared to traditional hardware wallets and the gas costs could be prohibitive on the mainnet initially, although other EVM and Layer 2 chains have low enough fees to make it viable. .
It also allows the use of two-factor authentication; sign transactions on your phone using a fingerprint or facial scan; setting monthly spending limits on an account; and the use of session keys to play blockchain games without constantly having to approve transactions.
Users who lose their phone or device can use time-locked account social recovery through a trusted friend group or even a commercial service. weiss said:
“It gives you the same functions as a bank without having to trust a bank.”
The standard has been in development for two years with the team funded through grants from the Ethereum Foundation. While similar functionality is available in the Argent and Gnosis smart contract wallets, these solutions require centralized components called relays to pay gas fees, while ERC-4337 decentralizes the entire system.
Weiss was one of the main authors of Etherum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 4337 along with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and five others. He said Buterin had first posted about the concept nine years ago “before Ethereum even launched, it’s taken us so long to get here.”
There have been numerous proposals to enable account abstraction before this, but they all required a hard fork of Ethereum, and took a backseat to more urgent updates like Merge. ERC-4337 is an alternative approach that uses a decentralized infrastructure called “packers”.
Account abstraction is extremely powerful.
Here are some of the things you can do to get the most out of it: pic.twitter.com/jWavGLzBhE
—John Rising (@johnrising_) February 25, 2023
In very simple terms, the process works like this: a smart wallet signs a “user operation” that is sent to a special mempool, which is basically an organized queue of transactions (albeit a different queue than the normal Ethereum mempool).
Packers are like miners or validators, they take user operations from the mempool and return the desired result to the wallet. The bundlers also pay for the gas (transaction fee) required and are compensated by the user’s contract account or by a third party known as a “payer”. This could be a decentralized application (DApp) or it could be a wallet provider.
The first production-grade package to be deployed on the mainnet is from wallet and infrastructure provider Stackup, with more to come soon. “It is without permission; anyone can run a wrapper,” says Weiss. “It is not reprehensible.”
Smart accounts, or account abstraction, are shaping up to be a key topic for cryptocurrencies in 2023. The technology has already been natively incorporated into StarkWare’s zk-Rollup and zkSync Layer 2 solutions, and Visa designed an automated system of payment of bills in cryptocurrencies that makes use of it.
Related: Visa Invents Schemes To Let You Pay Bills Automatically From Your Crypto Wallet
Stackup co-founder John Rising tweeted this week that an added benefit of account abstraction is that projects can use simple, easy-to-understand language to onboard new users instead of arcane technical terms.
“Because the contract handles the esoteric stuff of the blockchain, you don’t need to use words like ‘gas’ or ‘nonce’ to accurately describe what’s going on. This is a huge win for cryptocurrency adoption and security.”
