Why Your Chain's Success Hinges on Its Native AA Infrastructure

Every new chain inherits the wallet onboarding bottleneck. Users must manage seed phrases, pay for gas upfront, and face non-standard signature schemes. This caps your TAM at ~5M power users.

• User Drop-off: >60% fail at first deposit due to gas complexity.
• Vendor Lock-in: Your UX is dictated by MetaMask's roadmap and fee structures.
• Innovation Ceiling: Impossible to build native social recovery, batched ops, or session keys.

Gas abstraction is the killer app. A chain-native paymaster allows apps to sponsor gas, enabling credit-based onboarding and stablecoin fee markets. A native bundler ensures transaction ordering sovereignty.

• Acquisition Tool: Enable gasless transactions for first-time users, removing the #1 barrier.
• Economic Moat: Capture value from fee abstraction vs. leaking it to Ethereum's ERC-4337 mempool.
• Latency Control: Achieve sub-second inclusion guarantees vs. variable ~12s Ethereum bundler latency.

Letting every team deploy their own Safe{Wallet} fork creates a security nightmare and siloed liquidity. You get 1000+ singleton wallet contracts with no chain-level interoperability or upgrade path.

• Security Debt: Each team independently audits upgrade logic and signature validation.
• UX Fracture: Wallet A cannot interpret transactions from Wallet B, breaking composability.
• State Bloat: Irrecoverable assets locked in abandoned contract wallets bloat your state.

Mandate a single, audited, and upgradeable Account Factory contract as a primitive. This becomes the chain's standard for AA, akin to Ethereum's ERC-20. Enforce it at the RPC level.

• Unified Security: One audit surface for the entire ecosystem. Leverage formal verification.
• Native Composability: All dApps speak the same account language, enabling cross-app session keys and batch transactions.
• Sovereign Upgrades: Chain can deploy critical security patches to all accounts simultaneously.

Rollups that simply port Ethereum's ERC-4337 mempool are building a parasitic system. They inherit Ethereum's bundler economics, latency, and censorship risks, making their AA a marketing checkbox, not a competitive advantage.

• Economic Leakage: Fees flow to Ethereum-based bundlers like Stackup or Alchemy.
• Latency Prison: UserOps wait for Ethereum block time (~12s) plus rollup proof time.
• No Differentiation: Your AA story is identical to Arbitrum, Optimism, Base—a race to the bottom.

Build a vertically integrated AA stack: Native Bundler, Paymaster, and Signature Aggregator. This turns AA from a compatibility layer into a performance and business model primitive.

• Fee Capture: Keep 100% of paymaster markup and bundler MEV. Fund chain treasury via AA-native revenue.
• Performance Edge: Offer ~500ms end-to-end finality by cutting cross-chain dependencies.
• Innovation Sandbox: Experiment with new signature schemes (e.g., BLS) and intent-based architectures like UniswapX natively.

Starknet's Cairo-native accounts make AA the default, not an afterthought. This first-principles approach eliminates the overhead and security risks of EVM-based AA wrappers.

• Developer Primitive: Smart accounts are a core VM feature, enabling native social recovery and batched transactions.
• User Onboarding: Seamless sponsored transactions and session keys are built-in, not bolted on via a separate standard.

zkSync's native AA via the LLVM compiler bridges Ethereum familiarity with L2 innovation. It offers a smoother migration path for EVM devs while baking in advanced features.

• EVM+: Maintains bytecode compatibility but extends the protocol with native paymasters and account abstraction at the core.
• Ecosystem Catalyst: This native support has attracted projects like Gnosis Pay and Argent to build their flagship smart wallets on Era first.

Chains like Arbitrum and Optimism rely entirely on the ERC-4337 standard for AA, creating a fragmented, inefficient user experience dependent on external bundler and paymaster networks.

• High Latency: UserOps must compete in a separate mempool, adding ~500ms-2s of latency versus native L2 tx inclusion.
• Security Dilution: Adds a new trust vector (bundlers) and fragments fee logic away from the core protocol's security.

Solana's philosophy negates the need for complex AA by optimizing for raw state speed and low, predictable fees. Its 'stateless' approach with compressed NFTs and light clients solves many UX problems AA targets, but differently.

• Alternative Path: Achieves mass UX (e.g., Tensor NFT trading, Jito MEV capture) through parallel execution and ~$0.001 fees, not smart accounts.
• The Risk: Lacks the programmable security and recovery models that define the AA paradigm, creating a fundamental architectural divergence.

Fuel's UTXO-based model with native AA is designed for parallelizable state access. This isn't just about AA features, but about making those features scale horizontally without congestion.

• State Minimization: UTXO model eliminates shared state conflicts, allowing AA operations (like batched payments) to execute in parallel without rollup-level bottlenecks.
• The Future Proof: Sets a new benchmark where native AA is a prerequisite for maximizing hardware utilization, a lesson for Monad and other parallel EVMs.

Avalanche's subnet model pushes AA responsibility to individual chains, creating a Tower of Babel for user experience. Without a strong, shared native AA standard across the ecosystem, interoperability and composability suffer.

• UX Fracture: A user's smart account on Subnet A is useless on Subnet B. This defeats the purpose of a unified wallet experience.
• Missed Network Effect: Contrast with Polygon AggLayer's vision of unified liquidity and state, which requires a coherent cross-chain AA strategy at the protocol level.

Users won't adopt a chain where they must hold its native token just to pay fees. This creates a massive onboarding and liquidity fragmentation barrier.

• Eliminates onboarding friction by allowing sponsorships and paymasters.
• Enables stablecoin-first UX, letting users transact in USDC or any ERC-20.
• Unlocks session keys for seamless gaming and social app experiences.

ERC-4337 Bundlers at the client level (like Reth, Erigon) are table stakes. True native AA integrates validation logic into the protocol's consensus and state transition function.

• Guarantees atomic composability for batched operations across protocols.
• Enables global fee markets decoupled from a single native token.
• Future-proofs for intents by making the chain a natural settlement layer for solvers.

Chains without native AA become commodity execution layers. Native AA lets you embed unique primitives that attract sticky, complex applications.

• Attract the next UniswapX or CowSwap by being the optimal intent settlement layer.
• Enable native account abstraction for DeFi (e.g., single txn for approve+swap+supply).
• Become the default for social recovery wallets and institutional smart accounts.

If you don't own the user's account layer, cross-chain intent solvers like Across and messaging layers like LayerZero will. They'll route liquidity and users based on execution cost, turning your chain into a dumb VM.

• Lose control of the economic relationship with the end-user.
• Become vulnerable to MEV extraction by external bundler networks.
• Cede innovation to L2s and alt-VMs that bake AA into their DNA.

Don't just copy-paste ERC-4337. Design your AA system around your chain's unique value prop (e.g., parallel execution, privacy).

• Integrate Paymaster logic into the mempool for sponsor-selected transaction inclusion.
• Build state precompiles for signature aggregation (BLS, secp256r1 for passkeys).
• Expose native batched transaction primitives in your SDK for dApp developers.

Track the percentage of Total Value Locked in smart accounts versus EOAs. This is the true measure of your chain's developer traction and user sophistication.

• Smart Account TVL >50% signals a mature, app-chain ready ecosystem.
• High Paymaster-sponsored volume indicates sustainable business models.
• Growth in batched transaction count proves developers are leveraging native primitives.