#Etherum co-founder #VitalikButerin explains why ERC-4337 is important.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently tweeted to reiterate the importance of ERC-4337, a standard that implements account abstraction on the protocol without any changes to the consensus layer. He also shared a thread from 1.5 years ago explaining the rationale and design of the standard that he co-authored with other Ethereum developers.

ERC-4337 was deployed on the Ethereum mainnet in March 2023 and has since grown and adopted significantly. According to the latest data from ERC-4337.io (a website that tracks the progress of this standard), in February 2024, multi-chain ERC-4337 conducted a total of 2.989 million transactions (UserOp) and The number of active AA accounts reached 945,000, new AA accounts reached 845,000, both record highs. Bundler, Paymaster and Wallet Factory activity also reached new highs.

ERC-4337 allows users to use a smart contract wallet containing arbitrary verification logic instead of an externally owned account (EOA) as their primary account. This brings greater flexibility, security and usability to wallet designs as well as reduces complexity for end users. For example, users can choose different signature schemes, pay gas fees with #erc20 tokens instead of $ETH , or ask third parties to sponsor their gas fees.

However, ERC-4337 also faces some challenges and limitations. One of them is that account abstraction is still mainly focused on #polygon , a #Layer2 scaling solution for Ethereum. This is because Polygon offers lower gas fees and faster confirmation times than the Ethereum base layer, which is said to be crucial to the user experience of ERC-4337. However, this also means that ERC-4337 users must rely on the security and availability of Polygon, which may not be as strong as Ethereum.