Are L2s Building a New Walled Garden with AA?

Account abstraction fragments liquidity. Each L2's native AA stack (e.g., Starknet's, zkSync's) creates a unique user session key system. These keys are non-portable, forcing users to generate new credentials per chain. This defeats the composability promise of a unified L2 ecosystem.

Paymaster dominance creates vendor lock-in. L2s subsidize gas via their own sponsored transaction systems. This makes their chain the default, disincentivizing users from bridging to a competitor where their gas subsidy is invalid. It's a classic loss-leader strategy.

Evidence: The ERC-4337 standard is a baseline, but L2s implement proprietary extensions. A user's Argent wallet on Starknet cannot natively interact with a Safe on Arbitrum without a complex, manual recovery process. The interoperability standard is the wallet itself, not the user.

Smart wallets are the new moat. L2s like Arbitrum and Optimism subsidize gas for native account abstraction (ERC-4337) wallets. This creates a user experience moat where moving to a competing chain incurs real cost and friction, unlike the trivial cost of switching a MetaMask network.

Sticky assets are the real prize. Native yield-bearing assets, like EigenLayer restaked ETH or Aave's GHO on Polygon, are programmable economic hooks. They create a capital lock-in flywheel where users are financially incentivized to stay within the L2's ecosystem to access yield and services.

The bridge is now a business model. Intent-based solvers like Across and Socket route users, but L2s will internalize this. The canonical bridge becomes a toll booth, with native AA wallets and assets designed to minimize external bridging, capturing MEV and fees.

Evidence: Arbitrum's Stylus and Optimism's OP Stack bake AA and custom precompiles into their core stack. This creates a technical divergence from Ethereum L1, making portability of complex dApps and user states between L2s non-trivial.

User acquisition is the bottleneck. The technical complexity of seed phrases and gas token bridging is a non-starter for mainstream adoption. Account abstraction (AA) directly attacks this by enabling social logins, gas sponsorship, and batch transactions.

L2s are the forcing function. High-throughput chains like Arbitrum and Optimism need seamless UX to justify their existence. Native AA implementations, like Starknet's account model or zkSync Era's paymaster system, are not features but core infrastructure for scaling.

The alternative is fragmentation. Without a standard like ERC-4337, each L2 builds a proprietary AA system, creating new silos. Standardization enables wallet portability and shared infrastructure, preventing the very walled gardens critics fear.

Evidence: Coinbase's Smart Wallet and Safe's modular stack are deploying ERC-4337, demonstrating that major entities are betting on a unified, abstracted future, not isolated gardens.

Account abstraction decouples execution from the chain. It moves transaction logic from the protocol layer into a user-owned smart contract wallet. This creates a portable identity layer that operates consistently across any EVM chain, from Arbitrum to Base.

The current L2 model is a walled garden. Applications build on a single rollup to optimize for low gas and fast finality, but this traps users in that ecosystem. AA wallets like Safe{Wallet} and Biconomy make the user, not the chain, the primary point of integration.

Portable sovereignty requires new infrastructure. Cross-chain intent protocols like UniswapX and Across demonstrate the model: users express a desired outcome, and a solver network executes it across fragmented liquidity. AA is the user-side agent that orchestrates these intents.

The metric is wallet retention across chains. If 80% of a Safe wallet's transactions remain on a single L2, AA failed. True success is a user fluidly moving assets and actions between Optimism, zkSync, and Scroll with a single session key.