There has been development after development coming out of the largest smart contract-capable blockchain network in the world, Ethereum. Just two days ago on 28 February 2023, the Shanghai upgrade went live on the Sepolia testnet of the Ethereum blockchain. This testnet upgrade, out of other features, consisted of the ETH withdrawal feature that has been highly anticipated ever since the Ethereum Merge took place back last year on 15 September.

And more recently, announced at WalletCon 2023, Ethereum developers announced the release of the ERC-4337 feature, also known as 'account abstraction'. This is essentially a key enhancement that could make it easier for a user to recover their crypto assets stored in their wallets if they lose their private keys to an online wallet.

To that effect, this new standard officially termed the ERC-4337 was deployed via a smart contract called as EntryPoint, according to data Ethereum blockchain explorer, Etherscan.io.  This was further confirmed by Yoav Weiss, who is a security fellow at the Ethereum Foundation. According to a report by CoinDesk, this smart contract has already undergone a proper security audit in accordance with standard operating procedures.

This was announced by the Ethereum Foundation, which helps to fund and steward development on the Ethereum blockchain, at the ETHDenver conference at a WalletCon 2023 event.

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In a conversation with CoinTelegraph, Weiss also said, that new users will no longer need to learn about complicated seed phrases or even the technical process of setting up a wallet to onboard new users into the world of DeFi and crypto.

“The next billion users are not going to write 12 words on a piece of paper. Normal people don’t do that. We need to give them better usability, they shouldn’t need to think about cryptographic keys.”

This feature has been in the works for quite some time now and even Vitalik Buterin tweeted about ERC-4337’s advantages back in October 2022.

“We’re narrowing down an actual path for account abstraction, something we’ve always wanted but have not actually managed to have,” Buterin tweeted.

How does Account Abstraction work?

For some background, there are two different kinds of accounts that can be used to store crypto assets. The first is External Owned Accounts (EOAs) and the second is Contract Accounts (CAs).

The most common kinds of EOAs, which is also the one preferred by most Ethereum users is the EOAs, which you can see in the form of Metamask, Trust Wallet, and the like. With EOAs, wallet users are given a pair of private and public keys, and anyone can send crypto to an EOA using their public key. The only problem with EOAs is that it is susceptible to human errors like forgetting private keys to their own wallets and thus losing their crypto holdings.

The other kind is the contract account - where the accounts are wholly controlled by code – not private keys – so they cannot initiate transactions themselves.

This is where Account Abstraction comes in. Account Abstraction addresses the issues faced by an EOA account by merging it with a CA – therefore creating built-in mechanisms that can allow users to keep access to their crypto. Thus a normal crypto wallet is converted into a smart contract that prevents any loss of crypto assets due to human error, making it more user-friendly.

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