Why ERC-4337 Will Render Many Current Standards Obsolete

Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) force users to manage private keys, creating a single point of failure. This has led to ~$3B+ in annual losses from hacks and scams. The entire security model is user-hostile.

• Key Benefit 1: Social recovery & multi-sig become native, eliminating the need for complex Gnosis Safe deployments.
• Key Benefit 2: Session keys enable granular, revocable permissions, making wallet drainers obsolete.

Projects like Biconomy and Gelato built entire businesses to solve EOA's gas payment rigidity. This creates fragmented, protocol-specific solutions and sponsor dependencies.

• Key Benefit 1: Native paymasters enable sponsored transactions, gasless onboarding, and fee payment in any ERC-20 token.
• Key Benefit 2: Unifies the stack, rendering most third-party gas relayers as unnecessary middleware.

EOAs can only sign simple transactions, forcing complex user intents into inefficient workflows. This spawned a cottage industry of solvers and aggregators like UniswapX and CowSwap to batch and optimize.

• Key Benefit 1: Smart accounts can natively validate complex, conditional logic, executing multi-step operations atomically.
• Key Benefit 2: Reduces the need for off-chain intent infrastructure, moving complexity into the account contract itself.

Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) are a security and UX dead-end. ERC-4337's Smart Accounts make seed phrases, gas sponsorship, and batched transactions native protocol features.

• Key Benefit 1: Eliminates the $1B+ annual loss vector from seed phrase mismanagement.
• Key Benefit 2: Enables gasless onboarding and session keys, unlocking mainstream adoption.

ERC-20 gas tokens (like CHI or GST2) and relay networks were complex workarounds. ERC-4337's native Paymaster contract standardizes fee abstraction.

• Key Benefit 1: Apps can pay fees in any token (stablecoins, loyalty points) or offer sponsored transactions.
• Key Benefit 2: Renders the entire gas token meta and custom relayers obsolete, consolidating liquidity and logic.

Services like Gelato and Biconomy built businesses on relaying meta-transactions. ERC-4337 formalizes this role into permissionless Bundlers, commoditizing the service.

• Key Benefit 1: Creates a competitive, open market for transaction ordering and inclusion, reducing costs.
• Key Benefit 2: ~500ms latency for UserOps via mempool competition, matching EOA speeds.

Multi-sigs (Gnosis Safe), social recovery wallets, and modular key managers become features, not products. The Smart Account is the base layer.

• Key Benefit 1: Composability: Recovery logic, spending limits, and 2FA plug into a single account standard.
• Key Benefit 2: Vendor Lock-in Eradicated: Users own their account logic, not a wallet vendor's proprietary stack.

Intent-based cross-chain swaps via UniswapX or CowSwap require flexible settlement. ERC-4337 Smart Accounts with signature aggregation are the perfect settlement layer, bypassing asset bridges.

• Key Benefit 1: Users sign a single intent, aggregators find the best path across LayerZero, Axelar, etc.
• Key Benefit 2: Reduces bridge TVL risk and eliminates the need for canonical token wrappers on every chain.

Today, security is fragmented across wallet apps, relayers, and dApp contracts. ERC-4337 centralizes critical logic into three auditable components: Smart Account, Bundler, Paymaster.

• Key Benefit 1: Standardized Security Model: One audit for a Smart Account module secures it for all users.
• Key Benefit 2: Reduces the attack surface from 100s of custom implementations to a few robust, battle-tested contracts.