The Future of Smart Contracts is User-Owned Automation

Users lose value daily to missed arbitrage, expired limit orders, and unclaimed rewards. This is a systemic inefficiency baked into passive smart contracts.

• Opportunity Loss: Billions in MEV captured by searchers, not users.
• Friction: Every DeFi action requires a new transaction and gas fee.
• Complexity: Multi-step strategies (e.g., yield harvesting) are manual and risky.

Wallets evolve from key managers to autonomous agents. Users set high-level intents ("maintain 50% ETH collateral"), and the wallet's embedded automation executes the low-level transactions.

• Intent-Based: User defines the what, the agent figures out the how via solvers like UniswapX or CowSwap.
• Gas Abstraction: Automation handles fee payment and optimization, often via ERC-4337 account abstraction.
• Continuous Execution: Runs predefined logic (e.g., DCA, stop-loss) without user presence.

Reliable, trust-minimized execution requires a decentralized network of nodes, not a centralized cron job. This is the critical backend for user-owned automation.

• Uptime Guarantees: >99.95% reliability vs. a single point of failure.
• Cost Efficiency: Shared network cost for triggers and execution.
• Cross-Chain Ready: Native support for automating actions across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, etc.

Paying for gas in the native token is a massive adoption barrier. Sponsored transactions are a band-aid, creating centralized paymasters and vendor lock-in.\n- ERC-4337 Bundlers create a competitive market for execution, but the paymaster is still a single point of failure.\n- Account Abstraction Wallets like Safe{Wallet} and Argent are building vertical stacks, but their generalized paymasters are not sustainable at scale.

Shift from transaction execution to outcome fulfillment. Users express what they want, and a decentralized network of solvers competes to achieve it cheapest and fastest.\n- UniswapX and CowSwap pioneered this for swaps. Across and Socket are extending it to bridging.\n- The winning stack will be a generalized intent layer that abstracts gas, slippage, and cross-chain complexity into a single signature.

Automation requires granting limited permissions, not infinite approval. Session keys allow a smart account to perform specific actions for a set time or until a spending cap is hit.\n- Rhinestone and ZeroDev are building modular frameworks for managing these attestations.\n- This enables trust-minimized auto-compounding, limit orders, and recurring payments without constant signing.

Monolithic smart accounts will lose. The winning architecture is a minimal kernel (like Safe{Core} Account Abstraction Kit or ZeroDev's Kernel) that delegates to modular, upgradeable extensions.\n- Pimlico and Stackup are building the bundler/paymaster infrastructure for these accounts.\n- Plurality Labs and Biconomy are competing on gas abstraction APIs. The kernel that best orchestrates this modular stack wins.

A smart account is useless if it's stranded on one chain. The final moat is seamless cross-chain state and execution. This isn't just bridging assets; it's about moving your account's permissions and history.\n- LayerZero's Omnichain Fungible Tokens (OFT) and Circle's CCTP provide the asset primitive.\n- Connext's Amarok and Hyperlane's warp routes are building the generalized messaging for smart account state.

The ultimate smart account is an agent that routes user intents across the most optimal execution layer—L2, app-chain, or co-processor—based on cost, speed, and security.\n- EigenLayer's restaking provides the cryptoeconomic security for these cross-domain verifications.\n- The stack winner will own the intent-solver network and the agentic routing logic, becoming the default OS for on-chain activity.

User-owned automation shifts the oracle dependency from the protocol to the user. A malicious or compromised data feed can trigger catastrophic, irreversible actions on your behalf. The attack surface moves from a few protocol-owned oracles to millions of user-managed ones.

• Single Point of Failure: Reliance on centralized price feeds like Chainlink for DeFi automations.
• Frontrunning & MEV: Publicly broadcast intents become juicy targets for searchers, negating benefits.

Automation requires persistent, funded, and reliable infrastructure to execute. Who keeps the lights on? If your agent's wallet runs out of gas or its keeper network fails, your financial strategy dies silently.

• Cost Proliferation: Users must manage gas balances across multiple chains for cross-chain automations.
• Centralized Bottlenecks: Services like Gelato or Keep3r reintroduce the trusted operator risk that decentralization aimed to solve.

Translating human intent into perfect code is impossible. A slightly ambiguous rule can be exploited or lead to unintended consequences. When a trade executes at a terrible price, who is liable—the user, the solver (e.g., UniswapX, CowSwap), or the intent protocol (Across, Anoma)?

• The "Code is Law" Paradox: Automation enforces code, not necessarily user intent.
• Adversarial Solvers: In intent-based architectures, solvers optimize for their profit, not necessarily your optimal outcome.

Automating a wallet requires granting signing permissions. This creates a permanent, non-revocable backdoor. If the automation logic is compromised (e.g., via a malicious dApp update), attackers have direct, pre-authorized access to drain assets.

• Irreversible Permissions: Unlike a daily spend limit, many automation setups require broad approve or permit signatures.
• Social Engineering Target: Phishing attacks will shift from stealing keys to tricking users into installing malicious automations.

Automated sovereignty across multiple blockchains (via LayerZero, Axelar, Wormhole) multiplies risks. You're only as secure as the weakest bridge. A failure or censorship on any chain in the workflow can freeze or lose assets, with recovery governed by fragmented, alien governance systems.

• Unified Attack Surface: Compromising one chain can trigger actions on another.
• Sovereign Incompatibility: Different chain finalities and reorg rules break atomic guarantees.

Abstracting complexity for mass adoption often means hiding critical risks. "Set and forget" automation marketed to novices creates a ticking time bomb of misunderstood positions, expired approvals, and unmonitored agent behavior.

• Comprehension Gap: Users delegate without understanding the underlying mechanics or failure modes.
• Monitoring Overhead: Truly managing autonomous agents requires more vigilance, not less, contradicting the value proposition.