Ethereum and Base Abandon a Shared Wallet Standard as Account-Abstraction Talks Break Down

Ethereum and Base have given up on building one shared account-abstraction standard for both networks and will ship competing designs instead, Ethlabs developer Derek Chiang said in a post on Monday. Chiang co-authored one of the two proposals and founded the wallet-infrastructure firm ZeroDev.

The effort tried to reconcile Base’s EIP-8130 with Ethereum’s EIP-8141, two proposals that make account abstraction native to the base layer, letting people pay network fees without holding ETH, sign with a phone passkey, and rotate keys. Talks ended the week before after the two sides found no design that served both.

“While we identified a number of technical solutions, they all required one side or the other to compromise at least a little bit on their core goals,” Chiang wrote. The two chains want different things: Ethereum weights censorship resistance, privacy and security; Base is built for scale, customization and compliance.

The proposals take different routes. EIP-8130, written by Coinbase engineer Chris Hunter, pairs a new transaction type with an onchain “Keystore” and makes each transaction name the authenticator that validates it, giving nodes predictable costs. EIP-8141, or Frame Transactions, splits a transaction into “frames” that let an account define its own validation and gas payment in code, which is more flexible but heavier for high-throughput chains. It carries a “must-ship” designation for Hegotá, a coming Ethereum hard fork.

The cost of the split lands on wallets, which may have to support both formats, though EIP-8130 accounts can still reach other chains through the existing ERC-4337 standard. “So separate ways we went, putting the burden on wallets to deal with the fragmentation that ensues,” Chiang wrote, though he argued that software can hide the difference from users.

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