Ethereum
Ethereum Developers Aim for Ease of Crypto Wallets with “EIP-3074”
As blockchain teams strive to reach the holy grail of mainstream adoption, making crypto wallets easier to use is suddenly at the top of the agenda.
Ethereum developers have made progress in their discussions and inclusion of some Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for the next big blockchain hard fork, Pecter.
One of the proposals that has sparked both support and concern from the Ethereum community is EIP-3074, a code change meant to improve the user experience with wallets on the blockchain.
Ethereum developers have fixed issues in the past that would make the user experience with wallets easier and rolled out features that unlocked new capabilities. But now, developers are working to make the experience even simpler and embedded in the blockchain.
This new change is supposed to allow a specific type of wallet, External Accounts (EOA), to be more programmable, by allowing smart contracts to authorize them.
Georgios Konstatonopolous, Chief Technology Officer of Paradigm said the that EIP-3074 “is a big problem. The UX of the portfolio will be multiplied by 10.”
Currently on Ethereum there are two wallet account types: EOAs, which are the most popular, like MetaMask and Coinbase wallets, and smart contract wallets, like Argent and Safe.
Users of EOA accounts receive a pair of keys – one public and one private – while smart contract accounts are code-controlled wallets. The problem with EOAs comes down to human error; If you lose a private key to an EOA account, there is no support service or key recovery process that can help you regain access to your funds.
Previous proposals, such as ERC-4337aim to make EOAs easier to use, a concept known as account abstraction (AA), which allows users to recover their crypto with smart contract features.
EIP-3074 is another step in this type of innovation, delegating transaction capabilities to smart contracts. A key part of the proposal is to allow users to group transactions together and have them signed once. Other features include third parties sponsoring user transaction fees, hence decentralized applications (dapps) can for example cover their users’ gas costs.
The proposal, created as early as October 2020, also allows users to sign transactions submitted by another party – for example, signing transactions from a different interface or signing them offline. THE authors are Sam Wilson, Ansgar Dietrichs, Matt Garnett and Micah Zoltu, according to the document.
The main difference between EIP-3074 and ERC-4337 is that “the former focuses on achieving all the benefits of execution abstraction, and the latter focuses on obtaining all the benefits of account abstraction across all EVM chains, but in a non-native way. is less efficient,” Yoav Weiss, developer at the Ethereum Foundation. writing. “These two steps provide some of the benefits of fully abstracting native accounts.”
While many community members have shown support for the proposal, others have warned of security issues with the batch transactions feature.
Lukas Schor, the co-founder of Safe who advocated for ERC-4337 and for Ethereum wallets to implement full account abstraction, expressed concerns that while this proposal is in the right direction, he is concerned that the EIP lacks “a clear path to full AA and will have a net negative impact on AA adoption.”
The co-founder of the Argent wallet, Itamar Lesuisse, also posted on that EIP-3074 could pose a serious security issue, writing that it allows “a scammer to empty your entire wallet with a single off-chain signature.” I think this will be a major use case.
Mudit Gupta, Head of Information Security at Polygon Labs, also had security concerns, calling on wallets to “ban MAGIC EIP-3074 signatures per wallet.”
“For security reasons, I do not want to expose my cold wallets to AA batch processing,” added Gupta.