Welcome to our weekly digest, where we unpack the latest in account and chain abstraction and the broader infrastructure shaping Ethereum.
This week: core devs hold off on making native account abstraction a Hegotá headliner after L2 pushback; a ZeroDev founder publishes a three-part retrospective on what ERC-4337 actually delivered; builders in the AA Mafia group debate why EOA migration has been slow; and the Ethereum Foundation drops its Poseidon hash in favor of standard hashes.
- Native AA Decision Delayed as L2s Raise Concerns
- ERC-4337 Retrospective: What Worked and What Didn’t
- Inside the AA Mafia’s EOA Migration Debate
- Ethereum Rethinks Poseidon for Its Post-Quantum Future
Please fasten your belts!
Native AA Decision Delayed as L2s Raise Concerns
At All Core Developers Execution Call #243, developers finalized Glamsterdam’s gas repricing and moved its public testnet, Platåberget, forward, but the headline for us is what did not happen. A decision on making native account abstraction part of Hegotá was pushed back again.
Client support for EIP-8141 Frame Transactions, the native AA enabler, has actually grown. Nethermind now backs it and could champion it as a headliner, Geth contributors call it increasingly important for post-quantum readiness, and Besu raised no opposition.
The hesitation came from Layer 2s. Base and Arbitrum raised concerns about adopting Frames before the wider EVM ecosystem converges on one account model, warning it could fragment the stack if L1 and L2s head in different directions.
There is already a competing design in play. Base has implemented parts of EIP-8130, an alternative that adds programmable-account features like key rotation and cross-chain account sync without new EVM opcodes, while Frame Transactions supporters argue their approach can address the concerns through further specification work.
In its own Hegotá priorities paper, Ethlabs still ranks Frame Transactions as its preferred path to native account abstraction, and the proposal has advanced to “Considered for Inclusion.” Breakout calls resume on August 25, with a possible decision at the August 27 call.
ERC-4337 Retrospective: What Worked and What Didn’t
ZeroDev’s CTO, who led the development of the Kernel smart account, published a three-part retrospective following ERC-4337’s move to Final status. His blunt conclusion is that the standard succeeded, but not as the consumer-wallet revolution many expected.
Production told a narrower story. Across roughly 1.2 billion UserOperations, sponsored transactions made up the vast majority of volume, activity concentrated on a few deployments like World Chain and Base, and there was little sign of people migrating their main EOA into a standalone smart account. In practice, ERC-4337 became a shared rail for gasless and embedded flows rather than a mass account switch.
The Kernel history, from v1 to v4, sharpens the lesson. The capability that mattered most was not batching or sponsorship but replaceable validation, the idea that an account can outlive its key and swap in passkeys, recovery, or new signature schemes. Fine-grained permissions shipped as a “scalpel” but were mostly used as an on-switch, because the safe, narrow path was never the easiest one.
His third piece argues the real unlock is in-place migration. The unit that should change is the authorization model, not the address, so users keep their existing account while its root credential is replaced, which is exactly what EIP-7702 starts and native account abstraction would finish.
The hard part he flags is removing the old key completely. Even after delegation, the original ECDSA key can still authorize changes, and many apps still trust a raw signature through ecrecover, so a true transition has to fix both the protocol and the application layers.
Inside the AA Mafia’s EOA Migration Debate
A recent discussion among account abstraction builders in the AA Mafia Telegram group dug into a stubborn question: why has EIP-7702 adoption been slower than expected? The thread pulled in people from Base, the Ethereum Foundation, ZeroDev, Etherspot and Ambire, among others.
The raw numbers are not small. One participant shared 7702 activation counts from roughly a week earlier, led by Trust Wallet at over 640,000, MetaMask at around 280,000, and Pimlico’s Simple7702 account near 200,000, with many more behind them. Still, most of those wallets do not enable 7702 by default, so a large base of plain EOAs remains.
Builders disagreed on how to read this. A ZeroDev voice argued 7702 was designed for short-term EOA improvements and should be judged against the EOA transition rate rather than smart-account totals, while others worried Frame Transactions could hit the same slow adoption unless wallet teams commit to supporting them by default.
A recurring theme was that the root key is both the strength and the weakness. As an Ambire participant noted, 7702 users cannot lose funds the way pure smart accounts can, because a root key always exists, but that same key is also the vector behind most drains and blocks a clean migration.
Practical friction came up too, from delegated contracts not being available on every network to wallets restricting which chains can use 7702 and missing support for backend-triggered gasless flows. The takeaway echoes the retrospective above, that native AA needs the wallets and the packaging, not just the protocol.
Ethereum Rethinks Poseidon for Its Post-Quantum Future
The Ethereum Foundation is dropping Poseidon, the SNARK-friendly hash it had championed for years, from its plans for Ethereum’s base layer. According to researcher Justin Drake, future zero-knowledge designs will lean on standard hashes like SHA-2 or BLAKE instead.
The reversal comes from a research breakthrough. New proof systems that work over binary fields can now make ordinary, battle-tested hashes almost as efficient inside a SNARK as the specialized ones, flipping the goal from SNARK-friendly hashes to hash-friendly SNARKs.
The appeal is security through simplicity. Standard hashes have withstood decades of analysis, so relying on them avoids the risk of a newer, more exotic primitive being broken, and it removes the need to wait years for Poseidon to be battle-tested.
Drake tied the move to a rough stretch for fancier cryptography, noting that lattice-based and isogeny-based schemes have taken hits in recent weeks, a thread we covered last week. For account abstraction, the same instinct favors conservative, swappable cryptography, which is one reason native AA through Frame Transactions is being designed to let accounts change signature schemes as the field shifts.
🛠️ Builder note: Etherspot
AA infra should make development easier, not harder.
- One RPC endpoint across chains
- Pay-as-you-go pricing on mainnet
- No markup on gas fees
- API key controls with built-in security
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