- Ethereum developers have deployed ERC-4337, a new standard that could make it easier for users to recover lost assets
- ERC-4337 utilizes Account Abstraction to help users recover access to inaccessible wallets
- The process is very different to BSV’s notary tool
Ethereum developers have deployed ERC-4337, a new standard that could make it easier for users to recover their assets if they lose private keys to an online Ethereum wallet. The new standard utilizes something called Account Abstraction, an addition to the Ethereum mainnet which changes the nature of an Ethereum wallet to allow for recovery of private keys should they be lost. The new standard was recently deployed via a smart contract called EntryPoint, with the aim being to eventually integrate Account Abstraction into the main Ethereum protocol.
What is Account Abstraction?
Account Abstraction turns an Ethereum wallet into a smart contract account, with two types of accounts available for holding assets: External Owned Accounts (EOAs) and Contract Accounts (CAs). Most Ethereum users prefer EOAs, which can be accessed through services such as MetaMask and Coinbase Wallet. Users are given private and public keys for EOAs, and anyone can send crypto to an EOA using their public key. However, only the EOA owner, who has access to their private keys, can initiate transactions.
CAs, on the other hand, are controlled by code rather than private keys, and are unable to initiate transactions themselves. The issue with EOAs is that if a user loses their private keys, they cannot recover them. Account Abstraction is a solution that addresses this problem by merging EOAs with CAs, providing built-in mechanisms for users to maintain access to their crypto.
These mechanisms include a social recovery system where multiple users can help recover access to an account if a user loses their private key. Account Abstraction also enables users to create multisig wallets, where a group of users has access to an account and multiple signatures are required to authorize transactions, providing an additional safety measure.
Different From BSV’s Notary Tool
The Account Abstraction feature is different from BSV’s notary tool, which has the avowed intention of forcing miners to reassign stolen coins on the blockchain. This requires purported owners to prove their ownership through a court order (or a document of equal power, according to the Bitcoin Association for BSV), a process that is open to abuse if fraudulent evidence is used to prove ownership.
There are suggestions that BSV figurehead Craig Wright will try to use the notary tool to claim the equivalent of the Satoshi Stash on the BSV blockchain, after claiming the BSV coins in the disputed 1Feex wallet which he says is also his.
