AlexandraWe are proud to announce that Etherspot’s team has received a grant from the Ethereum Foundation regarding the advancement of EIP-4337.
Account Abstraction (AA) has been one of the most popular topics in the Ethereum community for a long time. Account abstraction moves the Web3 infrastructure from the current “one-account-fits-all” approach, where someone can lose everything because of a small mistake, to a future where the account can be tailored to the user’s needs. This should radically improve the overall user experience and expand the application design space for developers.
There were a few account abstraction implementation proposals over the past years, but most of them required changes to the underlying protocol (consensus/execution level), which made them complex and difficult to implement, and involved further protocol modifications. Other existing solutions rely on centralized infrastructure, which comes with their own challenges: Infrastructure can be buggy, and relayers can be faulty, leading to failed user operations. All said this would lead to the centralization of the Ethereum ecosystem. Additionally, centralization can lead to censorship, compromising the open and decentralized nature of blockchain technology.
EIP-4337 introduces a separate mempool for operations done by account abstraction wallets as well as a new entity called a bundler, which combines users’ operations into the standard transaction format. Account abstraction can be implemented and enforced using these bundlers without any change to the protocol, and can be integrated more tightly later.
This is where the solution of a P2P interface bundler service becomes important. With the implementation of the P2P interface, UserOps received on one bundler gets propagated to all its connected peers. Therefore, even if one bundler has a faulty implementation or actively censors transactions, these UserOps will be processed by other bundlers in the network.
The Etherspot team has helped the Ethereum Foundation with the protocol specification and is piloting the implementation of a Typescript Bundler service and the P2P interface. Etherspot’s bundler is called Skandha. It’s already available on six testnets and eleven mainnets, including Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, Fuse, Mantle, Gnosis, Base, Avalanche, BNB, and Linea. The bundler components include the bundler’s specific JSON-RPC API, p2p user operation pool (mempool), and core bundling of user operations.
Like the diversity of clients at the consensus and execution level, diversity and several implementations of bundlers will make the account abstraction world healthier and safer. Thus, implementation will benefit the Ethereum & Account Abstraction ecosystem.
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