What Is Account Abstraction and How It Brings Mass Adoption Closer

So, for many years, Ethereum developers have been working on a way to solve this. Finally, in March 2023, the world saw the release of the ERC-4337 standard, which is key to Account Abstraction.

How Ethereum Accounts Work Now

There are two types of accounts:

• External Owned Accounts (EOA) that use a private key. Simply put, your wallets (Metamask and others)

• Accounts built on smart contracts (Contract Accounts, or CA)

EOA stores both your private and public keys. You use it for both holding and signing transactions.

The idea behind Account Abstraction is to separate transaction signing and asset holding, as well as combine the strengths of EOS and CAs into a new type of contract, ERC-4337. This means that regular users switch from EOAs to CAs whenever they need to. Meanwhile, the Ethereum wallet becomes an abstract smart contract. This eliminates the need to use EOAs to perform transactions.

Advantages and Disadvatanages to Using Account Abstraction

The main upsides are the following:

• No private key: now there's no need to be afraid of losing your seed phrase.

• Wallet protection without a seed phrase: any account access (two-factor authentication, biometric authentication, etc.) can be defined.

• Flexibility in gas payment: developers will be able to create wallets with gas payment even in fiat.

• New convenient wallet functions: now you can customize automatic payments, as well as merge and pre-approve transactions.

• No need for permanent signatures: you can authorize a contract for session access by signing only once

The downsides include:

• New attack vectors 

• Higher gas fees, as smart contract wallets require more computing power

• Difficulty in supporting multiple wallet networks

As of now, we can highlight several wallets that work with Account Abstraction:
Argent, Ambire Wallet, and Safe.

Conclusion

To summarize, introducing Account Abstraction can truly be called another major technical revolution in Ethereum. Besides offering significant security benefits, it makes the user experience as clear and simple as possible. Wallets can finally become utmost similar to simple banking applications.