Vitalik Buterin sheds light on Ethereum’s account abstraction journey at EthCC

At the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Paris, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin gave an insightful presentation on the history and evolution of “account abstraction” on the Ethereum blockchain.

Account abstraction is a feature in Ethereum that aims to make the system more flexible and easier to use. It essentially allows users to define the security model of their accounts, making Ethereum more adaptable for different use cases.

For instance, this feature allows users to set their own transaction validation rules, such as multi-signature requirements or spending limits. They can also make their accounts compatible with a future cryptographic algorithm.

Buterin described account abstraction as allowing Ethereum accounts to be controlled by smart contract code rather than private keys.

Early days of account abstraction

According to Buterin, the idea of allowing accounts to be controlled by code rather than just keys was present in Ethereum from the beginning.

The Ethereum Yellow Paper outlined two types of accounts – Externally Owned Accounts (controlled by private keys) and Contract Accounts (managed by smart contract code). However, some challenges emerged in the early days of implementing account abstraction.

In the first Ethereum proof-of-concept release, there was optimism that users would adopt multi-signature wallets. However, this did not happen immediately, and exchange deposit detection became harder with multi-sig. There were also complexities with paying miner fees from smart contract wallets. The original vision was for all transactions to be simple “calls,” but issues like non-unique transaction hashes made the problem difficult.

Evolution of account abstraction

The Ethereum community iterated on many account abstraction ideas over the years. Proposals emerged around standardizing signatures, using “breakpoint” opcodes, restricting access during transaction verification, and more. But progress was slow due to the complexities of…