⏩ TL;DR 🏃‍♂️

👋“So long!” clunky web3 wallets and 🙋‍♂️hello to a world of streamlined crypto awesomeness!

ERC-4337 has arrived, and it's shaking up the game with account abstraction and smart contract functionality all in one account. Here's what you need to know:

• ERC-4337 allows for the functionalities of both externally owned accounts and smart contract accounts, bringing the best of both worlds to your wallet experience.
• With the power of UserOperations, a higher-layer pseudo-transaction object, bundlers can package transactions together for faster, more efficient inclusion in blocks.
• Say goodbye to the hassle of account recovery and hello to worry-free, customizable services with ERC-4337.
• Oh, and did I mention it could be a major boost for the mass adoption of crypto? That's right; it's not just a game-changer for web wallets; it could be a game-changer for the entire industry.

So get ready to experience a new level of crypto coolness with ERC-4337. Sayonara, cumbrous wallets, and hello, sleek new future!

🥤Thirsty for more? let’s dive right in 🤿.

🥐 Introduction

As of March 2023, the ERC-4337 proposal has been deployed on the Ethereum mainnet, achieving the goal of account abstraction. It was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and other developers in 2021 and authorized to become an ERC in 2023. This is a big deal and a long-awaited proposal to introduce account abstraction using an alternate mempool. It's a big topic, but don't worry; we're going to break it down and make it easy to understand. So let's get started!

"Account abstraction […] is a key step in making blockchain technology more accessible and practical for everyday use."

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder

🤓 What’s going on here?

ERC-4337 enables a single account to have the functionalities of both externally owned accounts (EOA) and smart contract accounts. This change makes it possible to create more user-friendly crypto wallet designs such as social recovery, customization, and upgradeability and brings smart contract functionality to wallets in a single account.

Account abstraction is a way of separating the concept of an Ethereum account from the blockchain itself. In other words, instead of relying on the blockchain to store and manage account balances and transactions, we can use a separate system to do that. By using an alternate mempool for account abstraction, we can create a separate system for managing account balances and transactions without having to modify the blockchain itself 😱.

🤔 Wait a second!..

I know what you're gonna say: "Isn't storing account balances and transactions on the blockchain the whole purpose of the technology?" And you'd be absolutely right, but there are also benefits of using account abstraction. One is scalability - by reducing the amount of data that needs to be stored on the blockchain itself, we can make Ethereum more scalable and efficient.

Another is flexibility - by using an alternate system to manage accounts, we can create more flexible transaction structures and lower gas costs.

And finally, account abstraction can enable more advanced privacy features by allowing for more sophisticated account management.

⚙️ How does that work?

ERC-4337 was implemented using a higher-layer pseudo-transaction object called a UserOperation, which is similar to rollups. Users send UserOperation objects into a separate mempool, and bundlers package these objects into a transaction that gets included in a block. The bundlers pay gas for the bundled transactions and get paid fees by the individual UserOperation executions.

👉 To give you a concrete example of how this might work, let's say you have an Ethereum account with a balance of 10 ETH. Normally, this balance would be stored on the blockchain, and every time you make a transaction, the blockchain would need to update your balance to reflect that transaction. But with account abstraction using an alternate mempool, your balance would be stored outside of the blockchain, in the alternate mempool instead. When you make a transaction, the alternate mempool would update your balance and handle the transaction, without having to involve the blockchain at all.

🤨 What’s the catch?

Well, you might be thinking that this is amazing and you need to get into it immediately, but as usual, you need to be aware of the potential tradeoffs.

While account abstraction could provide benefits like scalability and flexibility, it could also introduce additional complexity and potential security risks, such as Malicious UserOperations, Centralization of bundlers or compromised mempool. So it's important to carefully weigh the pros and cons before implementing it in a project.

I'll also keep an eye on developments in this area - account abstraction using an alternate mempool is still a relatively new proposal, and there may be additional research and development in the coming months and years.

⏮️ To recap:

ERC-4337 is a proposal to introduce account abstraction using an alternate mempool. It has been deployed on the Ethereum mainnet, achieving the goal of account abstraction, and enabling a simpler and more user-friendly crypto wallet experience, account recovery, and a wide range of customized services.

You can read more about it right here 👉

🔥If you've been reading this far, you are an absolute legend 😎 and I sincerely appreciate it 🫰. Consider leaving a like or a comment for more content like this.

Follow me on twitter 🐣: @stephabauva

See ya 👋