Why the Next Major Smart Account Standard Won't Come from Ethereum

ERC-4337's UserOperations must be processed on Ethereum's base layer, inheriting its ~12-second block times and high gas volatility. This makes native social recovery, batched transactions, and session keys feel clunky and expensive, capping UX innovation.

• Latency: Native AA actions are gated by L1 finality.
• Cost: Simple paymaster sponsorship can cost $5+ during congestion.
• Complexity: Bundler/Paymaster economics are fragile on a high-fee chain.

Chains like Starknet, zkSync, and Solana are building account abstraction directly into their protocol layer, bypassing the bundler middleware. They leverage native fee sponsorship, sub-second finality, and parallel execution to make features like 1-click onboarding and gasless transactions trivial.

• Performance: Transactions settle in <1 second with minimal cost.
• Integration: AA is a protocol feature, not a standard add-on.
• Ecosystem Fit: High-throughput chains need AA for scalable dApp UX.

The winning model isn't a one-size-fits-all standard but vertically integrated stacks where the chain, VM, and account model are co-designed. Fuel's parallel state model and Berachain's gasless fee market are impossible to retrofit onto Ethereum L1. This creates a moat for L2-native AA that ERC-4337 cannot cross.

• Innovation Pace: L2s can ship VM-level AA features in months, not years.
• Specialization: Chains optimize AA for their specific dApp vertical (DeFi, Gaming, Social).
• Adoption: Developers choose the chain with the best native UX tools.

Starknet boasts ~1M deployed smart accounts. zkSync's native AA facilitates 90%+ gasless transactions for apps. Solana's zkLogin (Google/Twitter sign-in) is an AA-adjacent feature impossible on Ethereum L1 today. The developer momentum and user growth metrics are decisively moving off-chain.

• Deployments: Leading AA userbases are on L2s.
• UX Metrics: Gasless tx rates are >10x higher on integrated chains.
• VC Funding: $100M+ invested in L2-native AA infrastructure in 2024.

Ethereum's core mandate is security and decentralization, not user experience. Protocol upgrades require years of consensus. This creates a vacuum for L2s like Starknet, zkSync, and Arbitrum to implement native account abstraction, bypassing L1 politics entirely.\n- ERC-4337 adoption is glacial on L1 due to high gas costs and lack of native support.\n- L2s can hardcode paymasters and bundlers into their sequencers, making gas sponsorship seamless.

Starknet launched with native account abstraction, making smart accounts the default, not an afterthought. This first-mover advantage creates a developer-centric environment where dApps are built for smart accounts from day one.\n- No need for ERC-4337's singleton contracts or external mempools.\n- Enables session keys, social recovery, and batched transactions as primitive features.

zkSync Era's hyperchain vision allows app-chains to define their own data availability and security models. This flexibility is the perfect breeding ground for bespoke account standards tailored to specific use cases like gaming or DeFi.\n- Developers can implement custom signature schemes (e.g., ECDSA, BLS) without L1 approval.\n- Volition mode lets users choose between Ethereum DA or a cheaper, custom DA for account operations.

Arbitrum's push into parallel execution with Stylus (WASM) and Nova (AnyTrust) creates a performance imperative. The next account standard must handle high-throughput, low-latency state transitions, which is antithetical to Ethereum's serialized design.\n- Smart accounts can manage complex, stateful sessions across multiple dApps in a single tx.\n- Boomerang (cross-chain) messaging via the Arbitrum Orbit stack makes multi-chain smart accounts viable.

The OP Stack's Superchain model standardizes core components across a network of L2s. A smart account standard deployed here gains instant interoperability across dozens of chains, something impossible on a fragmented L1.\n- Shared sequencer networks (like Espresso) enable atomic cross-chain transactions for smart accounts.\n- Creates a unified developer platform where account logic works identically on Base, Mode, and Zora.

Ethereum provides the bedrock security, but L2s own the full user stack from sequencer to RPC. They control the economic and technical levers to make a new account standard actually work. The winner will be the chain that bakes AA into its economic model, using transaction fee discounts and staking rewards to drive adoption.\n- This is a business model innovation, not just a technical one.\n- The standard will emerge from whoever achieves dominant market share in active smart accounts.

ERC-4337's reliance on Ethereum's execution layer creates a fundamental scaling ceiling. Every user operation competes for the same block space, making gas sponsorship models economically unviable at scale.\n- Problem: Bundlers face ~12-second latency and volatile gas costs.\n- Consequence: Mass adoption requires sub-second finality and <$0.01 fees, which L1 cannot provide.

The next standard will be intent-based, not transaction-based. Chains like Sui and Aptos with native parallel execution are building this natively, separating declaration from execution.\n- Solution: Users submit signed intents; a solver network competes for optimal fulfillment.\n- Precedent: This model powers UniswapX and CowSwap, enabling MEV protection and gasless UX.

A monolithic chain cannot optimize for every smart account function. The winning standard will be a modular protocol spanning specialized layers.\n- Key Insight: Separation of signature aggregation (zk layer), intent solving (app-chain), and settlement (L1).\n- Example: Berachain's gas-neutral model or Celestia-based rollups can bake native account abstraction with custom fee tokens.

Major capital is flowing to chains building account abstraction into their consensus layer, not as an afterthought. This funds superior developer tooling and ecosystem incentives.\n- Evidence: Starknet (native AA), zkSync (native AA), and Monad (parallel EVM) have raised $1B+ combined.\n- Result: These ecosystems will onboard the next 100M users with seamless onboarding, not Ethereum L1.