The Ethereum Foundation is set to push for major changes to the account abstraction standard in Ethereum to reduce gas consumption – especially for layer 2.
On January 10, the Ethereum Foundation shared a preview of drastic changes to the ERC-4337 standard specification, related to account abstraction, also known as smart accounts. .
According to developer John Rising in the update shared, the new version v0.7 applies the lessons from 9 months using ERC-4337.
The biggest change is in the structure of account abstraction transactions, which are more complex than regular Ethereum transactions. These transactions now require specifying 5 gas values instead of just 1.
Rising explains:
“Users must specify more than 1 gas value to ensure an account can perform calculations while its signature is being checked.”
Previously, Rising explained why more gas values are needed.
“With smart accounts, users can have many different types of signatures and pay gas fees in many ways. This means that the amount of gas needed will vary and the transaction must specify the amount it is willing to spend on this validation.”
This leads to more accurate gas estimates and reduced gas costs, especially on layer 2 networks, as these changes reduce the amount of data that needs to be published.
“The main benefit of v0.7 for users is reduced gas fees. It uses a number of tricks to use transaction data more effectively, which is especially useful on layer 2 blockchains,” Rising explained and added.
The new specification will also penalize users 10% for all unused gas in execution, “which prevents applications from executing transactions with unnecessarily high gas limits.”
Account abstraction, also known as “smart accounts,” builds on underlying Ethereum accounts by allowing accounts to have programmable rules and logic, opening up many fields new use cases that today’s simple accounts cannot accomplish.
Ethereum accounts today are somewhat passive and static, but account abstraction allows them to be flexible and programmable. This innovation was proposed by Vitalik Buterin and other EIP-4337 developers in September 2021.
The Ethereum Foundation has not announced a target date for v0.7 but said security testing is now starting.
“My guess is that everything will be finalized by ETH Denver by the end of February,” Rising said.
