Why Smart Accounts Render Most SDKs Redundant

Smart accounts are the new integration layer. Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) forced developers to assemble fragmented SDKs for wallets, gas sponsorship, and transactions. The ERC-4337 standard abstracts these concerns into a single, programmable user object.

The SDK is now the smart account itself. Instead of integrating MetaMask's SDK for signing and Gelato's SDK for gas, developers interact with a smart account's unified interface. The account's logic handles signature aggregation, fee abstraction, and batched execution.

This shifts complexity to infrastructure providers. Projects like Stackup, Alchemy's Account Kit, and Biconomy now compete on the quality of their bundled account implementations, not on selling discrete SDKs. The developer integrates once.

Evidence: Wallet providers like Coinbase and Safe are building smart account SDKs that subsume functions from a dozen legacy libraries, reducing integration surface area by over 70% for common DeFi applications.

Smart Accounts invert the client model. SDKs like ethers.js and web3.js are built for externally owned accounts (EOAs) where the user's private key is the client. Smart Accounts move this logic on-chain, making the contract the primary client.

The new SDK is the RPC endpoint. User interaction shifts from local signing to sending user operations (UserOps) via a Bundler. The critical interface becomes the ERC-4337 Bundler RPC, not a local cryptographic library.

This kills the integration tax. Projects no longer need to support 20 different wallet SDKs (MetaMask, Coinbase Wallet, Rainbow). A single ERC-4337 entry point standardizes interaction for all Smart Accounts, from Safe to Biconomy.

Evidence: The Alchemy Bundler handles over 1 million UserOps daily, demonstrating that the RPC layer, not the local SDK, is now the dominant integration point for user transactions.

SDKs create vendor lock-in. Each integration (e.g., WalletConnect for connections, Safe for multisig, Gelato for gas sponsorship) forces a protocol to adopt a specific vendor's stack, fragmenting user experience and complicating upgrades.

Smart accounts are the universal SDK. A single ERC-4337 EntryPoint and Smart Account standard replaces dozens of discrete SDKs for gas, batching, and recovery, delegating complexity to the wallet layer where it belongs.

The maintenance burden is asymmetric. Teams maintaining Safe{Core} AA SDK, ZeroDev Kernel, or Biconomy modules update once; protocols integrating myriad point-solution SDKs must constantly patch and audit each dependency.

Evidence: The rise of ERC-4337 Bundlers like Pimlico and Alchemy shows infrastructure consolidating. A protocol using a Safe Account with Pimlico's bundler eliminates need for separate relayers, gas-tank, and tx-building SDKs.

SDKs are integration glue, not core infrastructure. They exist to paper over the incompatibility between Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) and modern dApps, requiring developers to stitch together wallet connectors, gas sponsors, and bundlers.

Smart Accounts are the native interface. A dApp built for an ERC-4337 Account Abstraction standard like Safe{Core} or Biconomy interacts with a single, powerful account object, eliminating the need for a fragmented SDK to manage disparate services.

The bundler is the new SDK. The critical infrastructure shift moves from client-side integration to network-level execution. Services like Stackup's bundler or Alchemy's Account Kit handle transaction packaging and gas, rendering most frontend SDK logic redundant.

Evidence: The migration is already visible. Polygon's zkEVM uses a native Account Abstraction model where user operations are native primitives, bypassing the need for the complex SDK layers required on Ethereum L1.