Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum, proposes to make it a standard that all wallets on the network are managed by smart contracts instead of unique private keys. The proposal is known by the name of “account abstraction” or ERC-4337.
The co-creator of Etheruem, although he is not currently among the group of developers who are in charge of maintaining the network, has always been very active in proposing new proposals. the roadmap published last week, suggests how to bring account abstraction to Ethereumwhat he calls “the dream of the developer community”.
The original proposal, was published by Buterin late last year. Now, with the new roadmap, Buterin sets a path for account abstraction to become business as usual.
Currently there are two types of wallet in Ethereum; those dependent on private keys (EOA or externally owned account) and smart contract accounts. The standard proposed by Buterin establishes that only smart contract wallets existand that each EOA in the network is converted automatically.
The usual wallets are backed by a seed phrase (12 or 24 words that the user must write down or remember). Instead, with wallets based on smart contracts other systems can be established, as a multisignature accessed by email. Argent Wallet and others already work using this procedure and Buterin wants them to be the standard.
Account abstraction allows us to use smart contract logic to specify not only transaction effects, but also payment and fee validation logic. This enables many important security benefits such as multisig and smart recovery wallets, being able to change keys without changing wallets, and quantum security.
Vitalik Buterin, co-creator of Ethereum.
Wallets without private keys would be “mandatory”, according to Buterin’s proposal
Buterin, in his roadmap, sets short, medium and long-term goals. Among the first is bringing the ERC-4337 into full production. This implies developing user-friendly wallets that implement this technology. In addition, it is proposed to make them compatible with Ethereum’s second layer scalability solutions, such as rollups.
In the medium term, the Russian-Canadian developer argues necessary to implement verkle trees to reduce commissions. As can be seen in the existing wallets governed by smart contracts, it is one of the main problems they present (because they pay much more onerous commissions than “common” wallets).
And, in the long term, the leader of the etherean community proposes that the use of these wallets be “mandatory”. Thus, Ethereum users would no longer have to write down or remember 12 keywords, but instead would have easier ways to access their funds.