Hi you early adopters, I have fantastic news about the future of Ethereum! There’s a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal(EIP-4337) that’s going to make it much easier to onboard new users to web3. You’re probably wondering, how can this help me, someone who already uses DApps(Decentralized Apps) and crypto? 

Shifting from Builder Experience to User Experience

Currently, the majority of technical resources are dedicated to onboarding developers and investors into web3. While this is extremely important for any socially built technology, we also have a serious problem onboarding non-technical users. EIP-4337 is trying to fix this with something called Account Abstraction.

Current Digital Wallets are Difficult to Use

Take a look at these two user flows. The first one is web2 and the second is web3. 

As you can see, there are a lot more to using a web3 app than web2. The user has to download a separate app (wallets) and know how to use it properly or they’ll end up wasting money on unnecessary transactions/fees. 

What Account Abstraction Does

Awesome, so if we want to add new users to the space, we’ll need to incentivize them more than their web2 counterpart… right? Nah, let’s just make using web3 easier.

Account Abstraction is exactly what it sounds like, the DApp has a custodial wallet that’s managed by the user account. Without boring you with the technical details, current custodial wallets are severely limited, and EIP-4337 aims to change that. This will change the user flow to the following:

Notice that the user’s assets are “locked” inside the DApp’s Wallet, instead of being freely available on the User’s External Wallet. The user has to pay a gas fee to transfer the assets from the internal to the external wallet, but otherwise the system looks much cleaner!

Please not, this EIP is not released and is subject to change as it develops. If you want to learn more about EIP-4337, please check the official documentation.

Also follow me on twitter @nikhildesigns_ for more web3 explainers!