Ethereum Developers Propose Measures to Reduce Smart Account Transaction Costs

The Ethereum Foundation team has proposed changes to the ERC-4337 specification aimed at reducing gas prices for smart account transactions.

brb rewriting all of @stackup_fi‘s docshttps://t.co/uBs2rwok3K

— John Rising (@johnrising_) January 10, 2024

Developers activated the standard implementing the account abstraction concept in Ethereum in March 2023. According to Stackup founder and CEO John Rising, the proposed “radical and critical” updates are based on nine months of experience with the solution.

The release of ERC-4337 v0.7 is not final. The expert noted that significant revisions might be made following an audit by OpenZeppelin specialists.

The main changes in the document concern the structure of smart account transactions. These operations are more complex than simple network transfers because they require users to specify more than one gas limit. The update provides for five different values (one of which is optional).

“The goal of these changes is to make gas estimation more accurate and reduce costs. The savings will be most significant at the second layer, as the amount of data that needs to be published will decrease,” explained Rising.

Another innovation will be a 10% penalty for all unused gas. This is intended to prevent applications from submitting transactions with unjustifiably high limits.

Rising believes that developers will present ERC-4337 v0.7 at the ETH Denver conference (from February 23 to March 3), as they did with the first version of the standard last year.

The head of Stackup emphasized that all Ethereum infrastructure providers will support the v0.6 specification until the changes are fully implemented. Based on his experience, this could take up to six months.

Previously, Rising acknowledged that users show little interest in smart accounts.

Earlier, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described account abstraction as a catalyst that could attract a billion users to the network.