Ether developer Yoav Weiss has shared Some notes on Ethereum’s roadmap for account abstraction.
Ether developer Yoav Weiss has shared Some notes on Ethereum’s roadmap for account abstraction.
In his post, Weiss provides a detailed overview of ERC-4337, what led to its development, and the Ether team’s future plans.
What is ERC-4337?
The ERC-4337 standard enables smart contract crypto wallets on the Ethereum blockchain, improving the user experience with decentralized applications (dApps).
The concept, introduced by the Ethereum team led by Vitalik Buterin, aims to transition assets exclusively to smart contracts instead of externally owned accounts (EOA).
ERC-4337 introduces a “pseudotransaction” object called UserOperation, which facilitates transactions on behalf of users and is stored in an “alt mempool” until confirmation. This initiative marks an important step towards improving the usability of Ethereum for dApps and smart contract interactions.
Brief history
Weiss analyzed the origins and evolution of ERC-4337, highlighting the journey since Vitalik Buterin. Initial proposition to the current focus on standardizing account abstraction (AA) in Layer 2 (L2) networks.
The development arose from wallet fragmentation due to custom implementations of ML by various L2 networks, leading to the need for a protocol-level standard such as ERC-4337.
The roadmap now includes rolled-up improvement proposals (RIPs), in particular RIP-7560, intended to facilitate the migration of L2 strings to native AA. RIP-7560 is being refined into separate optional RIPs to streamline the deployment process and address specific use cases such as validation, 2D nonces, aggregation, and EOA (externally owned accounts) improvements.
Future
The current focus has been predominantly on L2 adoption, but the value of implementing ML on Ethereum Layer 1 (L1) is recognized. The plan is to gradually transition L2 chains to RIP-7560 while Ethereum L1 continues with ERC-4337, ensuring compatibility and a smooth migration process over time.
Weiss emphasized the importance of collaboration with L1 core developers, L2 developers, and the broader community to refine RIP-7560 and ensure a successful implementation on both Ethereum L1 and L2.
Feedback is especially sought from developers working on the Ethereum Object Format (EOF) to optimize the clear separation between the protocol and user-facing aspects in RIP-7560.
Buterin’s opinion
Vitalik Buterin outlined four main goals for an account system revamp on Ethereum, emphasizing the need for key rotation and deprecation, quantum resistance, batch processing, and support for sponsored transactions.
He highlighted the limitations of Ethereum’s current end-user account (EOA) model in achieving these goals, underscoring the need to transition the entire Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) ecosystem toward smart contract accounts (SCA).
Buterin expressed his desire to avoid creating two separate developer ecosystems for smart contract wallets and EOA, emphasizing the importance of cohesion and interoperability within the Ethereum development landscape.
Ethereum core developers have recognized the importance of delivering incremental feature updates to improve the user experience in the short term, while also advancing a long-term roadmap for the evolution of Ethereum.
