After multiple rejected or stalled proposals to add native support for smart contract wallets (smart accounts) to Ethereum, ERC-4337 has been accepted as the (interim) standard to implement Account Abstraction (AA) without protocol level changes to the EVM. Over the last few months, there has been a surge in activity in a subset of AA which revolves around the modularization of these smart accounts to make them more easily extensible for both users and developers. This general approach is termed modular account abstraction and the following article aims to give an overview of the developments in this ecosystem over the past 3 months and where things are heading.

After many attempts to bring about smart accounts on Ethereum (incl. EIPs 2938, 3074 and 5003), we finally have ERC-4337 which standardises Account Abstraction via an alternative mempool without requiring protocol-level changes. Without going into too much detail about how ERC-4337 works (there are great explanations out there already), it has very loose requirements for the implementation of smart accounts. More specifically, the ERC only requires the smart account to have a function to validate a UserOperation and some way of executing that operation.