Everything About Account Abstraction: VISA meets Ethereum, Fuel & AA, Etherspot ERC4337

Everything About Account Abstraction: VISA meets Ethereum, Fuel & AA, Etherspot ERC4337

Written by

Alexandra

February 15, 2023

Welcome to our weekly rundown on account abstraction, where we explore the latest developments in this innovative technology that is revolutionizing the way we interact with the blockchain.

VISA has been testing payments in USDC on Ethereum

The head of the cryptocurrency division of the credit card giant Visa, Cuy Sheffield, spoke about the company’s new plans for integrating payments with digital assets. As Sheffield revealed during his speech at StarkWare Sessions 2023, Visa will allow its customers to convert cryptocurrencies to fiat money and vice versa.

This is one of the areas where we want to develop muscle memory. Just as we can convert dollars into euros during international transactions, we should be able to convert digital tokenized dollars into their traditional fiat counterpart,” said Cuy Sheffield, emphasizing that in the near future, the payment corporation will allow the conversion of stablecoins. 

Sheffield did not specify the exact dates for the new service launch, but he assured that Visa had already tested the technology and was satisfied with the result.

A recent proposal from Visa highlighted that with Ethereum crypto wallets, users could “withdraw” funds without having to sign each transaction manually. So this means that with Visa support, users can schedule automatic payments sent from self-service crypto wallets.

As a result, this will allow Ethereum user accounts to operate as smart contracts and have pre-execution features.

Fuel implements a highly performant AA

Fuel Network (an execution layer for the modular blockchain stack) has introduced stateless AA into its product.

According to the company’s blog, they targeted two benefits:

  • UTXO introspection. Now they allow developers to define their own application-level validation schemes.
  • No state bloat. Stateless account abstraction eliminates the problem of state bloating. The thing is that even when it is spent, it never goes into the state of the blockchain, only into history.

The Etherspot team works closely with Ethereum Foundation

The Etherspot team has had three online calls with the ERC4337 (Account Abstraction core team) to define the p2p specifications for the decentralized bundler.

Some of the final updates are as follows:

  • v0.01 of the spec is ready and currently under review by the core team;
  • the test suite will be updated to reflect the conditions specific to the p2p interface as soon as the protocol specifications are frozen;
  • they agreed to use libp2p (instead of devp2p) for the peer-to-peer communication of the bundlers.

For more info, please check the following tweets: 1, 2, 3. Follow Etherspot on Twitter to stay up to date!

Crypto Wallet Report: AA is a trend to look out for

ImToken, the largest crypto wallet in Asia, has released a report on the forecasted technological developments for crypto wallets in 2023. The report identifies custodial solutions versus self-custody, as well as smart wallets, especially those that utilize account abstraction (AA) and wallets based on multi-party computing (MPC), as the main areas of interest.

According to the report, one of the significant advantages of account abstraction is the ability to define personalized rules, making it unnecessary to rely on ECDSA. Additionally, users can set their withdrawal limits and other custom rules according to their preferences.

Chang-Wu Chen, the Head of Research at imToken, stated the following: 

 “the most important and interesting thing is that we can abstract accounts from EOA. So we can have a signer separate from the account. This is really ideal for the future because we can have a DID.

Chen adds that if the signer can be changed or restored, users can use the same account as their identification number.

Yoav Weiss on Account Abstraction and EIP-4337

A popular YouTube channel Bankless Shows has finally dropped the third chapter of StarkWare Sessions. There Yoav Weiss, a security officer at the Ethereum Foundation and pioneer of account abstraction with EIP-4337, tells us about Starknet, EVM equivalence, current developments and the future of crypto wallets.

Overall, Weiss is confident that the potential for smart contract wallets is enormous. We strongly recommend you allocate 20 minutes of your time to find out the latest EIP-4337 updates firsthand.

For those interested in learning more about Account Abstraction (EIP-4337), a curated list of resources is available here. It contains everything from detailed guides and coding samples to exciting projects that you may want to follow. 

Start exploring Account Abstraction with Etherspot!

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