Why Smart Contract Wallet Tooling Lags on ZK-Rollups

ZK-rollups like zkSync Era and Starknet have native AA, but EVM-compatible chains like Arbitrum and Optimism rely on a bolted-on ERC-4337 standard. This creates a fragmented development surface and forces tooling to support two fundamentally different models, slowing adoption.

• Dual Implementation Burden: Builders must target both native (e.g., Starknet OS) and EVM-4337 entry points.
• Fragmented User Experience: Wallets like Safe and Biconomy face inconsistent feature support across chains.

Every signature verification or social recovery operation in a smart contract wallet is a custom logic circuit that must be proven. This adds ~10-100ms of prover overhead per user op and can increase gas costs by 20-50% versus simple EOAs, making frequent, low-value transactions economically unviable.

• ZK-Circuit Complexity: Custom auth logic (e.g., multi-sig, session keys) requires new circuit constraints.
• Cost Proliferation: High fixed proving costs negate the L2 gas savings for simple actions.

Smart contract wallets rely on a bundler and paymaster infrastructure that is poorly indexed on L2s. Missing mempool visibility and unreliable RPC endpoints for estimating UserOperation gas lead to failed transactions and a >5% UX failure rate, crippling reliability.

• Mempool Obscurity: No public equivalent to Ethereum's tx pool for UserOperations, hindering bundler competition.
• RPC Limitations: Chainstack, Alchemy, and Infura L2 endpoints often lack specific UserOperation APIs.

Pioneering a modular, ERC-4337-compatible smart account standard optimized for ZK environments. It abstracts gas sponsorship and bundles user operations for L2 efficiency.

• Key Benefit: ~80% gas reduction for common operations via native L2 optimizations.
• Key Benefit: Pluggable validation enables social recovery, session keys, and MPC without protocol bloat.

Solving the gas token problem by providing robust, decentralized paymaster services. This allows users to pay fees in any ERC-20 token, abstracting away the native L2 gas token entirely.

• Key Benefit: Sponsorship SDKs enable dApps to subsidize or batch transactions for seamless onboarding.
• Key Benefit: Decentralized relay network ensures censorship resistance and high reliability for user operations.

Direct integration of the dominant Safe multisig standard at the L2 protocol level. zkSync's native account abstraction treats smart contracts as first-class citizens, bypassing EOA limitations.

• Key Benefit: Native protocol support eliminates the need for a separate bundler, reducing latency and points of failure.
• Key Benefit: Massive ecosystem leverage by bringing $40B+ TVL from Safe directly into the ZK-rollup environment.

ERC-4337 bundlers are generic and inefficient for ZK-rollups. New entrants like Pimlico and Stackup are building L2-optimized bundlers that understand rollup-specific gas economics and faster block times.

• Key Benefit: Sub-second operation latency by leveraging L2's ~500ms block times versus Ethereum's 12 seconds.
• Key Benefit: MEV-aware bundling protects users and can share profits, creating a sustainable economic model.

ERC-4337's paymaster model, which allows gas sponsorship, is broken on ZK-rollups. The current architecture requires paymasters to hold native gas tokens on every chain, creating massive operational overhead and fragmented liquidity.

• Key Constraint: A paymaster must prefund and manage balances on each L2, scaling costs linearly with chain count.
• Economic Drag: This kills the business model for session keys, gasless transactions, and subscription services, stalling adoption.

The fix requires moving beyond native gas. Emerging solutions like UniswapX and Across's intent-based architecture show the path: let users pay in any token, and let a solver network handle gas optimization and cross-chain settlement.

• Key Shift: Decouple payment asset from execution chain's gas token via intents and atomic swaps.
• Builder Action: Integrate with intent infrastructure (e.g., Anoma, Essential) or build generalized paymaster networks that use LayerZero or CCIP for cross-chain liquidity management.

Tooling from Safe, ZeroDev, and Biconomy is optimized for Ethereum L1 and simple L2s. ZK-rollups introduce new complexities—custom precompiles, different gas metering, and proprietary proving—that break standard AA SDK assumptions.

• Integration Hell: Builders face bespoke, low-level integration for each ZK-rollup (zkSync, Starknet, Scroll), negating the benefit of modular SDKs.
• Development Friction: This scares off application developers who expect plug-and-play wallet infrastructure.

ZK-rollup teams must treat AA as a first-class primitive, not an afterthought. This means building native AA precompiles and funding public goods for standardized proving circuits for social recovery and multisig operations.

• Builder Opportunity: Develop and open-source AA adapter layers for major ZK-VMs (Cairo, zkEVM).
• Investor Thesis: Back teams building aggregated proving services that batch signature verifications across thousands of smart accounts, reducing cost to <$0.01 per op.

Today, a smart account's state—its keys, recovery guardians, transaction policies—is siloed on each rollup. This defeats the core promise of a portable, chain-agnostic identity and creates a security nightmare for users managing multiple rollups.

• User Burden: Social recovery setup must be repeated on every new chain.
• Security Risk: Inconsistent configurations across chains create attack vectors and weaken the overall security model.

The endgame is a canonical, verifiable source of truth for account state. This can be achieved via EigenLayer Actively Validated Services (AVS) or a lightweight cross-chain messaging protocol that syncs critical state changes (e.g., guardian updates).

• Architecture: An AVS attests to the latest root of a global account state Merkle tree, which rollups can cheaply verify.
• Investor Mandate: Fund projects building cross-chain account registries and state synchronization layers, the missing middleware for unified identity.