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Quick Note on ERC-4337
Osgur Murphy O Kane
main
Key Takeaways
4 min read
  • ERC-4337 is an infrastructure for relaying smart contract wallet transactions in a decentralized way. Previously, these wallets had to host their own relayer. It does not introduce native account abstraction to L1, and contract accounts will mostly remain more expensive than EOAs for the foreseeable future.
  • To see meaningful adoption at L1, it must achieve a self-sustaining and sufficiently decentralized fee market for transactions, and dApps will need to adopt the ERC-1271 standard that allows smart contract wallet compatibility.
  • Given the higher costs associated with contract accounts, and the key dependencies listed above, strong and compelling use cases for smart contract wallets at L1 will need to be adopted for it to have an impact. Implementations of ERC-4337 at L2 and cheaper L1 chains will have a much more substantial impact, as it unlocks many objective usability improvements over the status quo.

Introduction

ERC-4337 has been heralded across crypto Twitter as the arrival of Account Abstraction on Ethereum. Technically speaking, it’s not. Account abstraction unifies EOAs and contract accounts, whereas ERC-4337 is an opt-in standard that can help decentralize the operations of smart contract accounts on Ethereum.

This note focuses exclusively on providing the reader with a high-level understanding of ERC-4337. To learn more about account abstraction, check out Nansen’s report here.

What is it?

ERC-4337 can be described as a transaction relayer infrastructure for smart contract accounts. It can enable the creation of a decentralized fee...