The Ethereum ecosystem is fragmenting, and wallets will have to come to the rescue
Ethereum’s base layer and the L2 Base abandoned a common standard, and now users’ wallets must translate between the two on their own.
Every time a transaction is sent from a cryptocurrency wallet, the network the user is operating on must validate that the operation is legitimate before executing it. On Ethereum’s main layer (L1), this validation is strictly limited to a single rule: the digital signature of a private key.
To overcome this rigidity, there is account abstraction (AA), a technical improvement that turns wallets into programmable smart contracts. This allows transactions to be authorized using alternative methods (such as biometrics or multisignatures), pay gas fees with tokens other than ether (ETH), or group multiple operations into a single click.
However, bringing this flexibility to Ethereum’s base protocol has created a major architectural dilemma. Up until last week, developers were trying to apply to L1 the same approach used by Base, one of the most relevant second-layer (L2) networks in the ecosystem, developed by Coinbase.
However, that unification attempt failed, and each network will now continue with its own proposed improvement (EIP) and its own account abstraction standards: Base with EIP-8130 and Ethereum with EIP-8141
$ETH $BTC $ZEC
Ethereum’s base layer and the L2 Base abandoned a common standard, and now users’ wallets must translate between the two on their own.
Every time a transaction is sent from a cryptocurrency wallet, the network the user is operating on must validate that the operation is legitimate before executing it. On Ethereum’s main layer (L1), this validation is strictly limited to a single rule: the digital signature of a private key.
To overcome this rigidity, there is account abstraction (AA), a technical improvement that turns wallets into programmable smart contracts. This allows transactions to be authorized using alternative methods (such as biometrics or multisignatures), pay gas fees with tokens other than ether (ETH), or group multiple operations into a single click.
However, bringing this flexibility to Ethereum’s base protocol has created a major architectural dilemma. Up until last week, developers were trying to apply to L1 the same approach used by Base, one of the most relevant second-layer (L2) networks in the ecosystem, developed by Coinbase.
However, that unification attempt failed, and each network will now continue with its own proposed improvement (EIP) and its own account abstraction standards: Base with EIP-8130 and Ethereum with EIP-8141
$ETH $BTC $ZEC
