“Smart Accounts” and new token standards have emerged to improve the existing user experience in crypto. What is this new hype and what are some of the latest developments?

Let’s dive into Account Abstraction ("AA")🧵👇

1) Account Structures

There are 2 types of account structures in @ethereum, where the majority adopt an externally owned account (“EOA”).

2) Account Abstraction

AA introduces the programmable logic that allows users to interact with their existing accounts by merging an EOA with a CA. This enables them to flexibly enhance their wallets with code, hence the term “smart contract wallets.”

3) Traditional institutions such as @Visa and wallet providers @MetaMask and @safe have unveiled AA innovations. More projects are embracing AA to enhance the existing infrastructures and find new use cases to improve the UX.

4) In fact, here’s a quick overview on the progress for AA-related Ethereum Improvement Proposals in the past, with EIP-4337 and EIP-6551 most recently implemented.

5) The release of ERC-4337 standards enables smart accounts to replace EOAs with a more flexible programmable layer. Since its deployment on March 1, 2023, the adoption rate has skyrocketed, largely driven by @0xPolygonLabs.

6) An area of focus was in the payments services through fee abstraction of the Paymaster component of ERC-4337 to enable ‘gasless transactions’ - users will not need to own the native token to pay for transactions. These experiments have been largely driven by Visa’s team.

7) A form of signature abstraction, delegable accounts enable users to interact with a dApp without approving every transaction. Use cases include scheduling payments for utility bills and subscriptions, or social media such as @LensProtocol to seamlessly post and comment.

8) ERC-6551 was a recent innovation in May 2023 that turbo-charged NFTs to become their own wallet (Token Bound Account) to custody other NFTs. The adoption rate has significantly risen as it seeks to improve the gaming and on-chain identity management sectors.

9) To learn more about Account Abstraction and future trends in the space, be sure to check out the full report at https://research.binance.com