On March 1, EIP-4337 deployed on the Ethereum mainnet heralding a new token standard – ERC-4337. The token standard implementation was initially proposed in September 2021.
At that time, it was described as:
An account abstraction proposal which completely avoids consensus-layer protocol changes, instead relying on higher-layer infrastructure.
Account abstraction essentially allows Ethereum wallets to operate as programmable smart contracts. This would enable users to recover lost private keys, among other benefits. New users may no longer need a deep understanding about the technical process of setting up a wallet, transactions or managing seed phrases. ERC-4337 is a step in the right direction for mainstream adoption. Grandma will finally be able to send crypto to her grandkids.
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These new smart accounts could also help onboard the next wave of users to Ethereum and Defi. As opposed to third-party External Accounts that hold one set of cryptographic keys, Contract Account wallets are programmed by smart contracts. ERC-4337 merges the two account types into a new one.
Furthermore, users can program different mechanisms to enable their private keys to be retrieved. Instead of writing down seed phrases, users could secure wallets with 2FA (two-factor authentication) or biometrics.
This could allow for storing cryptographic keys on smartphones.
In October, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin commented:
The big really valuable and necessary thing that ERC-4337 provides for account abstraction is a *decentralized fee market* for user operations going into smart contract wallets.
On March 3, Professor John Keeting briefly explained the advantages of Ethereum account abstraction. ERC-4337-enabled wallets could also carry out automated payments and set time-based spending limits, for example.
Account Abstraction” (ERC-4337) is here and it will change and improve wallet handling a lot: wallets without seed phrases, account recovery, transaction limits, and many other great features are now possible.
In December, credit giant Visa Proposal an automatic programmable payments system using Ethereum account abstraction.
ERC-4337 allows other wallets to sponsor your gas fees, enabling truly gas-free transactions. Imagine if a collection used its royalties to fund all gas fees for its holders or maybe we will start to see Ethereum gas fees sugar daddies.
Previously, when sending a user operation to be signed by an ERC-4337 verifying paymaster, you had to fill out the paymasterAndData input with random bytes so it matches approximately the length of the output you expect to receive, Kristof Gazso noted.
This was because while the paymasterAndData field was not getting hashed and signed, the OFFSET of the paymasterAndData was (read up on abi encoding to understand how it works).
Below is how the packing was done before: so if you used as an input an empty array of bytes for the paymasterAndData, as is the default, the offset would be lower than expected than after you input the real paymasterAndData, invalidating the signature.
The solution is to cut the offset of the paymasterAndData and the offset of the signature out of the packing, so it doesn’t get hashed. however, they are in the middle of the encoding, before the initCode and callData, two values which we need! so we use inline assembly to extract the parts before and after, and glue them back together before returning them.
Not only is this more dev friendly (you no longer have to insert random bytes for seemingly no reason in the paymasterAndData field of your users’ ops before signing them) but it actually also costs 149 less gas.
On March 2, Ethereum developers delayed the Shanghai staking hard fork until the middle of April. They confirmed that the final testing phase on the Goerli testnet will go live on March 14. The latest upgrade is a big step forward for the network. However, BTC losses are pulling ETH prices down today.
The asset tanked 4.8% during the Friday morning Asian trading session. As a result, ETH has plunged to a two-week low of $1,570 at the time of writing. Ethereum prices are currently 68% down from their November 2021 all-time high of $4,878. However, the asset remains within its range-bound channel as six weeks of consolidation continues.