Ethereum is developing upgrades like EIP-4337 to make crypto wallets as user-friendly and accessible as email accounts.
Ethereum, one of the leading cryptocurrencies, has big plans for its users, aiming to make crypto wallets as user-friendly as email. Revealed at the recent Ethereum Community Conference (ETHCC) in Paris, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin shared the vision of simplifying the crypto world with account abstraction.
Account abstraction isn’t a new concept. It’s been under consideration since before Ethereum was born in 2015. The game-changing idea is to shift from regular wallets, known as Externally Owned Wallets (EOAs), to wallets powered by smart contracts. Such a transformation could make handling a crypto wallet as simple as running an email account.
Simplifying Wallets with EIP-4337
The latest development in Ethereum’s quest to simplify crypto wallets is a new upgrade called EIP-4337 or Account Abstraction Using Alt Mempool. With this upgrade, users can create their own smart contract-based, non-custodial wallets. Moreover, these are wallets that only users control, just like their personal email accounts.
Unlocking a series of features such as effortless wallet recovery, these new wallets make transactions cheaper by eliminating the need for transaction signatures. Additionally, they allow the creation of team wallets, allowing multiple users to control a single wallet, much like shared email accounts.
This groundbreaking upgrade is believed to be a catalyst for widespread adoption of Web3, the decentralized internet. Much like opening a bank account and receiving money before making any transactions, users can get funds even before they register their wallets. Moreover, they can receive any token, even those that are not Ethereum, in their smart contract wallet and pay the transaction fees or ‘gas’ without needing to own Ethereum.
To make this possible, the new upgrade introduces “paymasters”, a feature that lets users pay transaction fees with the same token they’re transacting with.
Introducing Signature Aggregators for Efficient Transactions
A standout feature of the EIP-4337 upgrade is the integration of signature aggregators. These enable multiple signers to collaborate on a single transaction, using just one signature. This is a major leap, especially in rollups, which are solutions that speed up Ethereum transactions by bundling them together and processing them away from the main Ethereum network.
Through account abstraction, signature aggregation allows more data compression, leading to cheaper computations. According to Buterin, this could result in a whopping 86-fold reduction in transaction costs.
While EIP-4337 is a critical development, Ethereum isn’t stopping there. The platform is also working on another major upgrade known as EIP-4884 or Proto-danksharding. This upgrade will introduce a new data type that could dramatically cut costs and improve data usage efficiency.
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