Goodbye to Losing Wallet Access, Hello to ERC-4337

I know some of you are nodding off after reading “ERC-4337” in the headline, but I promise this is news that everyone *should* get excited about.

Imagine this:

You’re a fresh-faced, newcomer to the crypto world, eager to start making millions within the first hour of learning about what a token is. All guides point to creating a wallet first, to house your potentially massive token gains. So you start with MetaMask and create your first wallet address, and eagerly write down your 12 or 24-word seed phrase. Then you come across a DeFi protocol with huge staking potentials, but they require you to use a specific wallet in order to use their service. “No biggie” and create another wallet. Then you come across another wallet provider stating you can get a free ENS domain if you sign up with them. “I like free stuff” and you move forward there. So forth and so on. Eventually you have 15 wallets, but you became a bit lazy in writing down seed phrases for each and tracking what tokens you have in what wallet. Then you notice that one protocol you had put in $1000 worth of staked tokens is now worth 100x that much, and for some reason you can’t find the wallet provider you used, nor the address, and much less the private key/seed phrase to access it.

If this sounds ridiculous, it really isn’t. There are MANY stories of people losing access to their wallets, which were filled with BTC, ETH and other tokens that are worth quite a bit today. And they certainly won’t be the last either. This has been a problem for a long time, and although the process around wallet security has improved, it is far from perfect.

Enter in ERC-4337, the standard for “account abstraction” or smart accounts, in laymen terms. This new feature will allow 2FA, phone linking which will essentially provide a hardware wallet solution, social recovery (friends can verify it’s you) and much more.

This is a big step towards bringing crypto to the masses. It’s been a long time in the making, 2015 to be exact:

Written by: nikethereum.eth / Medium / Mirror