Will Account Abstraction Pave The Way For A Brand New Paradigm?

Do you agree that Account Abstraction will spark and encourage the mass adoption of blockchain? Even if you don’t, that’s what industry experts anticipate. So far, smart contracts are the most significant entities that exist in the crypto industry. Let us dive deeper into this blog to learn more about account abstraction in detail. 

Account Abstraction - A New Paradigm

Account Abstraction, some people name it “Smart Account, ” which indeed is an emerging brand new paradigm. Using ERC-4337 is a cultural reset that facilitates programmable blockchain accounts. This paradigm redirects user authentication to smart contracts, allowing the wallet developers to decide how they like to authenticate the users. With this, the developers will have more freedom in the network, which is a revolutionary step.  

What Is The Need For ERC-4337 Standard?

If you take Ethereum as an example, it offers two types of accounts– smart contract accounts and Externally Owned Accounts (EOA). The latter type works similarly to regular user accounts. However, you need a private and public key pair to handle an EOA. At the same time, you should remember that the private key is quite vulnerable. 

Based on a recent analysis, there was almost $1 Billion lost in 2022 due to private key exploits, making this one of the most lucrative hacks of 2022. Also, other safe alternatives are quite risky.  Whether it is a multi-signature wallet or a custodial wallet, both are almost susceptible to hacking and other malicious activities. 

Luckily, we can use account abstraction wallets which lay a strong foundation for resolving this ever-existing problem. 

Features Of ERC-4337

As soon as smart wallets went live, they helped users not to worry about remembering the complicated seed phrases (nothing but private keys) while setting up their wallets. The upcoming users will not have to think about cryptographic keys because ERC-4337 will improve the usability of wallets, similar to banks. These wallets are designed to provide the best opportunities for Web3 users to develop customized wallets. You can build your smart contracts with Ethereum with the help of an expert developer. 

Now, let us take a look at “Smart Contract Wallets.”

As we said earlier, most of the Ethereum wallets are EOA types, for example, MetaMask. So, if we incorporate account abstraction here, smart contracts wallets will hold the crypto assets instead of EOAs. 

What does this mean?– ERC-4337 provides features starting from 2FA for automatic recurring bill settlements and subscription plans. 

To describe in simple terms, users can get a similar experience to banks, along with the advantage that you can actually recover your account even if you lose the key. If needed, you can also set alerts to get a notification whenever an unauthorized person tries to access or withdraw from your account. 

Additionally, users can use digital signatures of their preference, set a spending limit, add or remove devices, including recovery options with a friend, securely authorize transactions, and more. It is possible with the assistance of a leading smart contract development company. 

This shows that Account Abstraction will entirely change the user experience for crypto users. ERC-4337 is accessible on all EVM-compatible blockchains like BNB Smart Chain, Polygon, and Avalanche. So, these infrastructure providers can offer developers tools to create and personalize Web3 wallets for users. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, this new paradigm will help to remove the prolonged reliance on EOAs, shifting users to adopt ERC-4337 integrated accounts. Even though this looks like a small step up the front, it will surely evolve into something big in the future Web3 market. The time will reveal!