ERC-4337 Account Abstractions: The Future of User-Friendly Crypto Adoption

The world of crypto ?? is constantly evolving, and with the rise of?Decentralized Finance?(DeFi), there is an increasing need for user-friendly ?? solutions that can make interacting with the?Ethereum network?easier and more accessible. That's where?ERC 4337?account abstractions?come in - a new standard that promises to revolutionize the way we use?Ethereum wallets?and?smart contracts.

The main purpose of ERC 4337 is to improve the?user experience ???of?crypto adoption?by making it more user-friendly, without the need to trust any central intermediaries. With this new standard, Ethereum wallets will be able to function as standalone smart contracts or?smart accounts, making the user experience on par with traditional finance systems. ??

Features that ERC 4337 will enable:

• No more seed phrases:?Eliminates the need for users to write or remember seed phrases ?? or go through the technical process of setting up a wallet.
• Secured signing ??: Transactions can be signed using 2FA or biometric authentication, making them more secure.
• Multi-signature approval:??? Transactions can be approved by multiple users, making it more secure and giving users more control over their funds.
• ?? Secured like Hardware Wallets: Enables cryptographic keys to be stored on the phone/laptop making it equally secure as par with hardware wallets
• Social recovery:?If a user loses their private keys, they can recover their account using a social recovery system.
• Customised payments: Schedule payments or setting of timely spending limits that can be configured to autopay bills and subscriptions
• Session keys: Ability to play blockchain games ?? without constantly having to approve transactions.
• Gasless transaction: ???Not necessary to use Ethereum or other Blockhain’s native currency for paying gas fees, also service provider can enable sponsoring of their user's fees.

While similar functionalities are available on existing?smart wallets?like Argent and Gnosis or gasless transactions via Biconomy, but the issue is relayers in them are still centralised entities which pays for the users gas fees;?ERC 4337 decentralizes the whole process.

How does Account abstraction works? ??

1. The standard works by having a?smart wallet?sign user's operations, which then get submitted to a special mempool( basically a pool of organised queue of transactions).
2. Bundlers, which are like validators, execute user operations from this mempool and deliver the desired result back to the wallet.?These bundlers are also responsible for grouping multiple transactions such that to pay the gas fees later all at once.
3. Paymasters, third party which can be DApps or?wallet providers, that cover for their platform users' gas fees.

Still, a long way to go! ??

As excited all the above features sound but still it will take time to achieve what it intended for in the first place "crypto adoption to masses" as,

• It’s a standard which requires user to setup a new account unlike a native implementation which upgrade all accounts to smart accounts by default. It is done this way as native implementation would have required a hard fork and might not got enough support due to Merge.
• But a hard fork would be inevitable in future to enable the upgrade of all accounts

Of course, there are still some limitations to ERC 4337.

For example, the whole process of?account abstraction?can consume a lot of gas and thus lead to high gas prices, especially on Ethereum. However, many developers are already working on gas-optimized approaches, such as using a?precompiled contracts(precompiled contract carries out common cryptographic functions without using much resource), to make the EVM operation cheaper rather than a?smart contract.

A bigger problem for using a smartphone wallet?? on Ethereum is that the security module uses a different cryptographic signing system (elliptic curve) than crypto.

Conclusion

Account abstraction has the potential to make crypto adoption more user-friendly. However, there are still some challenges that need to be addressed before account abstraction can be widely adopted.

I hope this article has given you a better understanding of ERC-4337 account abstractions. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment ??below.