Acknowledgements and Resources

This doc is mostly aggregated from the hard work of many people. Here are a few of the names: adietrichs, lightclients (matt), micahzoltu, SamWilsn, danfinlay, yoavweiss, VitalikButerin, real_philogy, etc.

• Here’s a list of resources used is this document

Overview / Background

From yoav’s post.

Some common terms used in this doc:

• EOA: Externally owned Account
  • A type of account most of us use that are controlled by a private key.
  • This type of account can originate transactions.
  • This type of account CANNOT execute (or is controlled by) code by itself.
• SCA: Smart Contract Account
  • An account that uses a smart contract and is controlled by code.
  • This type of account CANNOT originate transactions.
  • This type of account can execute code.
• AA: Account Abstraction
  • Account abstraction is a proposal to increase flexibility in the management and behavior of Ethereum accounts.
  • There are multiple (non-exclusive) approaches to achieve the goal of account abstraction (including but not limited to EIP-3071, ERC-4337, RIP-7560, etc.).

What is Account Abstraction?

Every Ethereum account implements five functionalities:

• Authentication: Proving your identity to login into an account.
• Authorization: The level of access you have for an account.
• Replay protection: A way to uniquely identify each action/operation performed by a user of an account.
• Gas payment: The way a user directly/indirectly pays the fee to perform actions/operations using an account.