Smart contract wallets and account abstraction

According to the post-merge Ethereum roadmap, account abstraction is slated to be supported as part of the splurge phase. There are two proposed EIP solutions for account abstraction, where one requires the protocol to change and the other doesn’t. The solution that requires the consensus layer protocol changes may take much longer to implement and also demand through testing. In the meantime, EIP 4337, which doesn’t require protocol changes, has been implemented to support account abstraction and smart contract wallets. Once EIP 4337 is implemented, you may not have much left to do at the splurge phase in terms of account abstraction.

Let’s start by understanding what EIP 4337 is in the next section.

Account abstraction and EIP 4337

As we discussed in Chapter 2, Ethereum Architecture and Ecosystem, Ethereum supports two types of accounts: externally owned accounts (EOAs) and contract accounts (CAs). To interact...