gm, the first few of the next billion users! Day by day, slow and steady, account abstraction is gaining more popularity, and I feel like an overly enthusiastic anime girl witnessing the conversations about AA online and IRL.
To no one’s surprise, I was a main actor in one of these conversations when I found myself explaining the account abstraction to my wife’s colleagues working in IT department of a bank after I happened to tell them that I started writing a newsletter about a blockchain topic. This was the moment I was secretly waiting. This was my moment to shine. My eyes lit up and grew big. My cheeks turned red. And I started explaining the account abstraction using Super Mario as an example. But first I needed to explain them how a typical web3 UX sucked with typical EOAs.
So, picture this: You're playing Super Mario, and in every world, you're collecting coins, mushrooms, and points by breaking bricks and defeating enemies along your journey. In a web3 setting, all of these are transactional processes within the game and you'd get interrupted by a pop-up to sign a transaction with your wallet every time you collect a coin or point. Sounds pretty frustrating, right? It's like putting a speed bump on your gaming experience.
Thankfully, the account abstraction introduces batch transaction. Thanks to batch transaction, you can collect all the coins and points (the transactions), and then sign them all at the end of the chapter to save your progress. This means you don't have to deal with the headache of signing every single transaction while you're trying to play your game.
Additionally, you can also create a session key for a limited amount of time, which means you won't have to approve or sign any transaction during that period. This is a huge breakthrough for UX, especially for blockchain games. With session keys, you can pre-approve the rules for interacting with a game so you can use it as much as you want within those rules without having to sign every single transaction.
Sessions can be defined in a variety of ways, including a given duration, a max amount of gas, a max transaction volume of a certain token, or a particular function on a particular contract. This means you can set up your sessions in a way that's best for you and your gaming experience.
So, my wife’s IT frens who are not yet a part of the next billion users, this is the technology that I’m writing about.
Now let's take a closer look at the ongoing account abstraction projects.
The amount of assets secured through @safe reached from $30M to $70B in just 3 years.
The winners of ETH Tokyo’s ERC-4337 Hackathon have been announced DayPass, Myna, Autopilot, Universal Paymaster and YORU.
@0xpass_io is looking for a founding engineer. Not an engineer but a great talent in design or growth, they’re waiting for you.
@SchorLukas started a petition to start calling “account abstraction” just “smart account”.
@rollupid is looking for early testers of a new account abstraction feature to request access to register session keys to your users’ existing smart contract wallets.
@mirrorplatform published a comprehensive guide on how to create a blockchain game for game developers.
@antalpha_labs gathering a great lineup of account abstraction projects for Antalpha HackerHouse Account Abstraction in Montenegro. @biconomy @candidewallet @pimlicoHQ @soulwallet_eth @UniPassID @0xMantle @Scroll_ZKP @ParticleNtwrk will be there.
@pier_wallet will soon offer easy transfer from crypto to fiat using @Transak’s offramp solution.
Pillar Wallet integrated @mtpelerin's on & off-ramp solution, making it easier to buy and sell digital assets using fiat currency right on the @pillarwallet mobile app.
Castle Wallet introduced multi-chain portfolio tracking.
AAScan's account abstraction block explorer now supports ERC4337 Entrypoint 0.6.0 data indexing on the Ethereum, Goerli, Polygon, and Polygon-Mumbai networks.
Argent is doing a slow, gradual rollout for our zkSync Era account as the network and the wallet are both in alpha.
Linen Wallet launched a quest on Layer 3 in which you can set up Linen Wallet, bridge to Gnosis and swap on CowSwap and deposit on Agave.
According to Blocknative, the number of UserOps on-chain continues to rise week-over-week. Testnets are still the most active as people explore the space but activity on Matic mainnet is quickly increasing.
Biconomy is organizing Pioneers of Account Abstraction program where they will select promising projects and give them hands-on support to imagine & implement AA use cases that will become standards for web3 UX.
Sequence Wallet published an article comparing smart contract wallets with MPC (multi-party computation) wallets.
The number of @AmbireWallet (Account Abstraction / Smart Contract Wallet) deployed on Avalanche reached 404.
UniPass is now live on KCC (Kucoin Community Chain). Users on KCC can now easily access KRC-20 tokens on UniPass.
Obvious partnered with Biconomy to create a smart contract wallet.
Braavos (smart contract wallet for StarkNet) v3.11.0 is out with significant cost savings when signing transactions with hardware signer and enhanced experience w/ full-screen mode.
ZeroDev have released ZeroDev v3, which has many exciting technical breakthroughs that they will unpack in the following weeks.
Pimlico, an infra provider for account abstraction wallets, is live on Arbitrum!
JiffyScan added Avalanche Mainnet, Avalanche Fuji Testnet and Sepolia Testnet to the explorer along with Bundler and Bundle views.
We've all seen how a simple mistake, whether caused by bad actors or negligence, can cost you hundreds, thousands or millions of $$$. Here it’s another example:
With regular web3 wallets like Metamask, you have to keep your private key secret, and if it's exploited, all your funds are gone. However, with smart contract wallets, you don't need to expose your private key.
You interact with smart contracts that handle the signing of transactions, and these contracts can be designed to have extra security measures like requiring multifactor authentication (setting up two or more authentication methods for your crypto wallets, where a transaction is only signed once you confirm the approval via a second option like email or SMS) or hardware signers (using an iPhone or Android’s secure enclave to turn any smartphone into a hardware wallet that users can verify transactions using biometric data like a fingerprint or Apple Face ID - Braavos already implemented this, and Opclave is working on it). All these extra measures make it much harder for anyone to steal your funds from your wallet.
A team of neuroscientists from MIT has found that the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds. And here I present you the history of account abstraction in 13 miliseconds.
A Deep Dive into the Technicalities and Applications of Account Abstraction and EIP 4337 by Steve Wang.
That’s a wrap! 🌯 Hope you enjoyed the second issue of the abstracted. Huge thanks from for reading this far. We’d be a happy homo sapiens if you could give us a follow on Twitter ❣️
