The role of account abstraction in the future of Web3 wallets

Author: Geek Web3 Source: X (formerly Twitter) @eternal1997L

Today, the people of Geek Web3 talked to a VC person about why AA account abstraction has not achieved a breakthrough in user adoption, and here is the opinion:

EIP-4337 is just an attempt to improve the application layer protocol of existing smart wallets. The things related to user experience advocated by the account abstraction are reflected in the previous smart wallets, but most of the smart contract wallets in the past are immature, and some need EOA to trigger, and are far from modular enough. What EIP-4337 has to solve more is not to bring what smart contract wallets could not achieve in the past, but to let the various components of the wallet enter a highly modular era.

The long-term significance of EIP-4337 is similar to the significance of ERC-20 for DeFi, its value is long-term, not short-term, so it cannot bring a leap from 0 to 1 in the user experience in the near future. The native account abstraction (native AA) has long been implemented on FLOW and Starknet, but it is clear that these two chains have not risen. Therefore, account abstraction in the recent cycle, the user adoption rate is often relatively limited, the most fundamental is the front-end level of the wallet and the optimization of gas fees, these two points may not play much role in EIP-4337 or 6900 (component modularity will even exacerbate gas consumption).

At the same time, the current AA and the new generation of smart contract wallets need more extensive publicity and guidance to allow more people to transfer from EOA accounts to smart contract wallet account-based operating habits.

In the past, Ethereum users were all coin speculators, who had long been accustomed to high-threshold wallet operations, and the AA scheme represented by 4337 was to implement a new generation of smart contract wallets, which were prepared for incremental users/Web2 users. Obviously, account abstraction is a necessary condition for mass adoption, but a necessary condition is not a sufficient condition. Account Abstraction will bring a large number of user adoption, and it will obviously have to wait until the blockchain has sufficient large-scale practical scenarios and conditions to achieve it (for example, Scroll Zhang Ye mentioned earlier that many people in Africa cannot obtain credit services, so making an identity verification system on the chain may be able to achieve mass adoption).