Why Smart Accounts Will Lock Users Into Walled Gardens

User operations must flow through a designated bundler, which pays gas fees and submits transactions. This creates a single point of control and rent extraction.

• Paymaster integration becomes a bundled service, locking in payment rails.
• MEV capture is centralized at the bundler level, creating a ~$1B+ annual revenue stream.
• Latency and reliability are dictated by the bundler's infrastructure, not user choice.

Sponsored transactions (gas abstraction) are the killer app for onboarding, but they create unbreakable vendor dependency.

• Session keys and subscriptions are issued by the paymaster, binding users to a specific service.
• Cross-chain gas becomes a proprietary offering, locking users into bridges like LayerZero or Axelar.
• Compliance and censorship filters are enforced at the paymaster level, not the protocol.

Smart accounts enable complex authentication (multisig, social recovery, passkeys). The signer logic is custom, non-portable code.

• Recovery guardians are often a curated list controlled by the wallet provider.
• Hardware security modules and biometric signers are integrated as proprietary modules.
• Switching costs become prohibitive; you can't export your social graph or trust assumptions.

Bundlers are the new validators. The entity controlling the bundler controls transaction ordering, censorship, and MEV extraction.\n- Who controls the bundler controls the user flow.\n- Paymasters become mandatory for gas sponsorship, creating a direct revenue dependency.\n- Projects like Stackup, Alchemy, and Biconomy will compete to be the default, not the interoperable layer.

ERC-4337's EntryPoint is an upgradeable singleton, but nothing stops competing implementations.\n- Alt Layer 2s will fork it to capture fees and user activity.\n- Smart accounts become chain-specific, breaking cross-chain intent architectures like UniswapX or Across.\n- User's social recovery network on Chain A is useless on Chain B's forked stack.

Gas abstraction is a trojan horse for business models. The paymaster who pays your gas owns your commercial relationship.\n- Token-gated transactions become the norm (e.g., only our token pays gas).\n- Data monetization becomes trivial (paymaster sees every user op).\n- This creates Amazon Prime for DeFi: convenience in exchange for a closed economic loop, stifling protocol-level competition.

The promise of portable smart accounts is undermined by key management and signature schemes.\n- Multi-chain MPC providers like Privy, Capsule become the de facto identity layer.\n- Switching providers requires a full wallet migration—a UX nightmare.\n- This centralizes trust in a handful of signing infrastructure vendors, replicating Web2's OAuth problem.

Smart accounts are modular, but integration points are proprietary. The Account Factory, Module Registry, and Signature Aggregator are all potential control points.\n- Winning SDK (e.g., ZeroDev, Rhinestone) dictates which modules users can install.\n- Audit and security become bundled services, creating a compliance moat.\n- This isn't open composability; it's IKEA furniture—you must buy all parts from the same vendor.

The infrastructure race is capital-intensive, favoring well-funded players who prioritize growth over decentralization.\n- Network effects in bundler/paymaster services create natural monopolies.\n- Interoperability standards will be proposed only after market dominance is achieved.\n- The end-state is a landscape of competing gardens (Coinbase, Polygon, Arbitrum stacks) where users are assets, not sovereign agents.