Dive into 4337: Account Abstraction on Ethereum

Ethereum's user experience was challenging for many, and numerous suggestions were made to enhance the UX. Account Abstraction aims to address Ethereum's UX issues. With ERC 4337, we can have superior UX on Ethereum. But how does it work? Let's dive deeper ??

Before we delve into AA, it's crucial to understand two foundational aspects of Ethereum: its Validity Rules and the PBS (Proposer and Builder Separation). Ethereum is designed to be simple, decentralized, and secure. As a result, it comes with hardcoded validity rules.

Ethereum's transaction validity rules are kept simple and hardcoded. This design choice is a significant reason behind the challenging UX on Ethereum. Let's explore PBS and see how it paves the way for the development of separate mempools, with a restaurant analogy.

Imagine a restaurant where the chef (block proposer) selects the ingredients (transactions) and cooks the dish (creates the block). The chef has complete control of deciding which ingredients to use while having some unalterable rules for ingredients to be included in dishes.

In the PBS restaurant model, there's a distinction between those who choose the ingredients and those who cook the dish. The 'selector' (the builder) picks out the ingredients, arranges them, and then offers them to chefs. This approach isolates picking process from cooking.

In any standard restaurant, any ingredient to be included in the dishes must meet certain standards. However, in the PBS restaurant model, the selector has the authority to modify these while the chefs are just cooking the dishes.

As a result, the selector can introduce new standards for selecting ingredients. This means customers can have different ingredient pools (referred to as 'mempool'). Thus, customers of the restaurant have the flexibility to order dishes with different ingredients.

This analogy represents how ERC 4337 comes into play. Account Abstraction, as introduced by ERC 4337, introduces a separate mempool with arbitrary validity rules and introduces a new transaction type called 'useroperation'.

PBS abstracts block building from validators, paving the way for the creation of separate mempools, each with its own set of validity rules. ERC 4337 leverages this feature of PBS to establish a distinct mempool specifically for AA transactions, termed 'userops'.

To achieve this, there's an entry point contract that all block builders must call to initiate a transaction. The entry point contract is divided into two parts: verifying user operations (userops), and executing the transactions.

It also introduces paymasters that allow users to pay using any ERC20 token of their choice. To ensure this functionality, ERC 4337 requires additional verification steps to check whether the paymaster has sufficient Ether to cover the user's gas expenses.

From aggregators to DoS protection mechanisms and beyond, we've delved deep into all aspects of Account Abstraction in our comprehensive guide.

Dive into our 'Ultimate Guide for Account Abstraction' report to learn more: https://blog.getclave.io/p/ultimate-account-abstraction-guide?r=2pwpma&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web