Ethereum Developers Target Ease of Crypto Wallets with ‘EIP-3074’

As blockchain teams strive for the holy grail of mainstream adoption, making crypto wallets easier to use is suddenly at the top of the agenda.

Ethereum developers are moving forward with their discussions and the inclusion of some Ethereum improvement proposals (EIP) for the next big hard fork of the blockchain, Petra.

One of the proposals that has attracted support and concern from the Ethereum community is EIP-3074, a code change that should improve the user experience with wallets on the blockchain.

In the past, Ethereum developers have addressed issues that would make the user experience with wallets easier and have implemented features that have unlocked newer functionality. But now developers are pushing to make the experience even simpler and wrapped up in the blockchain.

This new change should allow a specific type of wallet, Externally Owned Accounts (EOA), to be more programmable by allowing smart contracts to authorize them.

Georgios Konstatonopolous, Chief Technology Officer of Paradigm said about X that EIP-3074 “is a big deal. Wallet’s UX will be 10x better.”

There are currently two on Ethereum types of portfolio accounts: EOA, which are the most popular, such as MetaMask and Coinbase wallets, and smart contract wallets, such as Argent and Safe.

Users of EOA accounts are assigned a pair of keys – one public and one private – while smart contract accounts are code-controlled wallets. The problem with EOAs boils down to human error; If you lose a private key on an EOA account, there is no help desk or key recovery process that can help you regain access to your funds.

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Previous proposals, such as ERC-4337have aimed to make EOAs easier to use, a concept known as account abstraction (AA), which allows users to recover their cryptocurrencies with smart contract functionality.

EIP-3074 is another step in this type of innovation, delegating transaction capabilities to smart contracts. A key component of the proposal is to allow users to group transactions together and have them approved once. Other features include the fact that third parties sponsor user transaction fees, thus decentralized applications (dapps) can for example cover gas costs for their users.

The proposal, created already in October 2020, also allows users to sign transactions sent from a different party, for example by signing transactions from a different interface or signing them offline. THE authors they are Sam Wilson, Ansgar Dietrichs, Matt Garnett and Micah Zoltu, according to the document.

The key difference between EIP-3074 and ERC-4337 is that “the former focuses on getting the full benefits of execution abstraction, while the latter focuses on getting the full benefits of account abstraction over all EVM chains but in a non-native way that is less efficient,” Ethereum Foundation developer Yoav Weiss writes. “Both are steps to get some of the benefits of full native account abstraction.”

Community pushback

While many in the community have shown their support for the proposal, others have cautioned against moving forward due to security concerns with the batch transactions feature.

Lukas Schor, the co-founder of Safe who championed ERC-4337 and Ethereum wallets’ implementation of full account abstraction, concerns expressed that while this proposal moves in the right direction, he fears that the EIP lacks “any clear path to full AA and has a net negative impact on AA adoption.”

Also the co-founder of Argent Wallet, Itamar Lesuisse published on X that EIP-3074 could pose a serious security issue, writing that it allows “a fraudster to drain your entire wallet with a single off-chain signature. I expect this will be an important use case.”

Mudit Gupta, head of cybersecurity at Polygon Labs, he also had security concerns, asking wallets to “ban MAGIC EIP-3074 signatures on a per-wallet basis.”

“For security reasons, I don’t want to expose my cold wallets to AA batching,” Gupta added.

To know more: The Ethereum update could make it harder for you to lose all your cryptocurrencies

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