Ethereum developers can’t see eye to eye on two proposed code changes that could potentially improve user experience with wallets or solve the issue of censorship resistance.
Posted May 7, 2024 at 2:30 am EST.
Ethereum’s next major hard fork Pectra would introduce a host of new Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs), but one of them is facing pushback from the developer community, including the blockchain’s cofounder Vitalik Buterin himself.
The proposal, known as EIP-3074, introduces Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) opcodes: AUTH and AUTHCALL. The former allows externally owned accounts (EOAs) to authorize actions via a signed message and a commit, and the latter executes transactions on behalf of the authorized EOA.
Authors of EIP-3074 expect that this change will make EOAs easier to use, because of the ability to sign off on batched transactions together, and also having third parties sponsor transaction fees, opening the doors for decentralized protocols to potentially cover these costs for their users.
EIP-3074 is coming in the next Ethereum hard fork.
This is a big deal. Wallet UX will 10x.
Congratulations to Ethereum and the EIP-3074 sponsors.
Reth has already implemented and tested it. We are fans.
Let’s go. https://t.co/lUiK2kb3UT
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) April 11, 2024
While the proposal is an effort in Account Abstraction (AA), aimed at making wallets more flexible, it has faced pushback from authors of EIP-4337, which was deployed to the Ethereum mainnet in March 2023.
EIP-4337 is also an AA proposal, which supports introducing features to EOAs like paying gas fees in tokens besides ETH and account recovery mechanisms. However, that proposal sets out to achieve the goals AA using a offchain transaction relayer, without requiring any changes to the consensus layer.
“This is of course NOT simply a matter of “my AA proposal good, your AA proposal bad.,” said ZeroDev CEO in a blog explaining that developers behind the two proposals had fundamentally different visions for the Ethereum roadmap.
The core disagreements include whether EIP-4337 is the endgame for AA and if it was more urgent to solve censorship resistance or user experience issues. While those in the EIP-4337 camp believe that Ethereum should prioritize censorship-resistance even if it means delaying UX improvements, those in the EIP-3074 camp think that the network is already censorship-resistant enough.
The big really valuable and necessary thing that ERC-4337 provides for account abstraction is a *decentralized fee market* for user operations going into smart contract wallets.https://t.co/JUigSO5OtW
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 1, 2022
While the proposal would bring about more immediate user experience improvements, some developers think that including EIP-3074 in the Pectra hard fork would introduce security risks to the network.
“Ethereum’s account model is complex for users and thus introduces security risks. We need to improve it, not to weaken it. After 3074 inclusion I expect we’ll see more rugpulls, replay attacks, wallets drained. I hope to be proven wrong here as well,” wrote Ethereum developer Yoav.
The Ethereum Foundation is hosting a discussion on the proposal on Tuesday, which may determine its future.
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