Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and a member of the Ethereum team, published on Tuesday a new Ethereum improvement proposal (EIP), which aims at reconciling core developers disparate approaches in account abstraction for upcoming hardforks.
The proposal, EIP-7702, is a successor to EIP-3074 which was considered a Candidate For Inclusion (CFI) in Ethereum’s next upgrade known as Prague-Electra — or “Pectra.”
The road for 3074 to CFI was not smooth. It took a lot of time and effort debating EIP in multiple All Core Dev meetings since January.
In the next Hard Fork, developers have sought to offer tangible improvements to users while leaving open multiple paths to the “endgame” Account abstraction
The most likely candidate to go into production was 3074.
It wasn’t all positive. Ansgar Dietrichs, at the Ethereum Foundation, called it “relatively heavy-handed” The ACD conference call on January 18 was a disappointment, as were the reservations expressed more recently.
Buterin wrote a new proposal within 22 minutes according to ZeroDev CEO Derek Chiang. However, Dietrichs is also mentioned in the published proposal, along with Sam Wilson and Matt Garnett.
EOAs can temporarily be used as wallets for smart contracts using a new transaction type. After a transaction is completed, the EOAs revert back to normal accounts.
The developers can simplify their tasks with this approach by using existing contract codes and patterns.
“This EIP is designed to be very forward-compatible with endgame account abstraction, without over-enshrining any fine-grained details of ERC-4337 or RIP-7560,” The authors have written.
The new proposal, unlike 3074’s functionalities, aims to duplicate them without adding any new opcodes. By assuming a smart contract’s code temporarily, EOA can perform complex operations like batch transactions, making use of transaction sponsorship, and constrained sub-key operations — a security feature employing secondary keys (sub-keys) that have limited or specific permissions — within a single transaction.
In the future, it is anticipated that a wallet-centric account abstraction will become standard. The new EIP was designed to be fully compatible with EIP-4333, which will roll out in March of 2023. Existing wallet code and existing transaction frameworks are used to minimise disruption and double effort.
Hayden Adams, Uniswap’s Hayden Adams and Garnett Ashkhmin of 3074 have all lent their support to 7702, including core developers Garnett Ashkhmin.
In recent months the opposition to this previously-included improvement has grown as developers realized that it would be included in the next Ethereum update.
Ethereum’s Governance is built on consensus, with points of contention being debated publicly, on both group calls and on forums online, until there are clear decisions.
Independent teams of developers then come to an agreement on specifications which they code into the new version of their Ethereum client.
The operators of the thousands of validators will have to agree on installing new software in sufficient numbers to start a hard-fork successfully at an agreed date.
Pectra, the next major upgrade, will be available in Q4 2020.
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