Account Abstraction in Blockchain

The interaction of experienced or advanced blockchain users with dApps daily appears seamless from their perspective, solely because these are repetitive or identical transactions they are well-blended with.

We must admit that these interactions are seamless until you guide other users who have spent months or years in the ecosystem but yet find it hard to navigate some blockchain products.

Web3 aims to revolutionize some of the practices in this space and make them as simple as possible for common internet users to get on the train.

Account abstraction is an amazing Web3 product aimed at making owning and controlling assets as easy as eating a Pizza served hot.

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The type of wallets we have mainly operated over the past few years are majorly the ones generated via externally owned accounts, some of which include MetaMask, TrustWallet, Atomic Wallet, and so on, to mention a few.

EOAs wallets require the generation of seed phrase which serves as the key to accessing your wallet, they utilize private and public keys for wallet security, sending and receiving tokens, digital signatures, broadcasting transactions, and so on. These steps seem normal but it has a lot of limitations latent to many of us.

In essence, the steps involved in using EOAs are extremely cumbersome, only that we have not paid attention to them over the years. For example:-

• Create a wallet.
• Back up the seed phrase.
• Fund the wallet.
• Transfer to other wallets.
• Initiate a transaction (maybe smart contract triggered).
• Attach a digital signature.
• Pay the gas fee to get the transaction mined.
• Wait for the TX.
• Confirm the transaction.
• You pulled through and then continued.

You have to repeat all of the above steps each time you utilize an EOA-generated wallet for transactions and that is where account abstraction* comes in to play a vital role.

"Don't stop Building!" That's one of my favorite phrases in this ecosystem and that has led to more innovations that enhance our interactions in the crypto ecosystem. Web3 is aimed at making blockchain interactions stressless thereby making onboarding very simple which in turn enhances wide adoption across the world.

Account abstraction is the game changer with the introduction of the ERC-4337 token standard on Ethereum, this enables users to own wallets that are smart contracts based and this type is associated with minified interaction steps.

In EOAs, the lost seed phrase translates to lost funds but account abstraction is redefining this such that funds are held on smart contracts and the accessibility to the funds is much simpler than what we have seen in EOAs. The minified steps adopted in account abstraction are:

• The ERC-4337 standard utilizes an object UserOperation, which sends transactions for a user.

• Nodes on the EVM-compatible chains bundled numerous transactions (from numerous users on the chain).

• The bundler sends the transaction to the smart contract tagged EntryPoint and calls the function, handleOps.

• The loop ends at validateUserOp where an individual digital signature is assigned, if the signature is unique, the gas fee is estimated to push the transaction through.

Account abstraction eliminates dependence on private keys and manual validations from users. Smart contracts do the job of making the entire process more seamless than we have seen in the past.

• Dependence on private keys for account security is eliminated.

• Compatibility across several EVM chains.

• Multi-sig account operation which enables an organization to have a trustless control over funds.

• Reduced hack occurrence as assets are not directly stored on a wallet that relies on private keys for security.

Account abstraction is inarguably one of the best we have seen in years, a lot of existing projects and new ones are now working towards incorporating account abstraction. The logic is that users will always prefer a user-friendly product.

Transition into Web3 is no longer a consideration, it is here with us. Subsequently, we will explore some of the projects that have incorporated account abstraction.