Cregis Research: The Archeology of Ethereum Account Construction and the Value of Account Abstraction (AA)

First, review the "classical" blockchain public chain construction knowledge: Byzantine problems, double flower attacks and the pain points of Ethereum.

In the traditional Internet, when A pays B, two things happen: 1. A transfers the value of the money to B for value transfer; 2. A notifies B of the payment of one dollar, From an information standpoint, A loses a dollar, B gains a dollar, and A will gain something. How to confirm the above three processes simultaneously can be understood as a Byzantine problem.

What Bitcoin or the Byzantine problem wants to solve is to realize the atomic operation in the real world in the Internet environment or in the computer environment, that is, when the value transfer occurs, the information transfer also occurs. However, based on its concept of decentralization, Bitcoin cannot construct a complex Internet environment.

In this regard, Vitalik Buterin, who was not yet a god at the time, initiated a proposal on Bitcoin core, hoping to increase Turing completeness on the basis of Bitcoin to achieve more functions. After being ruthlessly rejected, Ethereum was born. However, Ethereum, which must run in a decentralized environment, still faces the biggest pain point: the linear environment cannot perform high concurrency and complex code compilation. This is why Vitalik has been encouraging users to enter the layer 2 network, advocating contract wallets and account abstraction, and even encouraging users to hand over some privacy to project parties in exchange for social login, social recovery and other user experiences close to Web 2.0: If Ethereum does not Make these changes, and it can't live up to its vision, remaining just an add-on to Bitcoin forever.

Core topic 1: What exactly is account abstraction?

There are two types of accounts on the Ethereum public chain, one is called external address account (EOA), which is characterized by free creation and can directly initiate transactions through signatures; the other is contract account (CA), which is essentially a smart contract. Therefore, it is impossible to initiate transactions directly, and has its own code area and data area; since creating a contract account = creating a smart contract = executing on-chain interaction, payment is required (this is V God’s previous debate on MPC wallet and CA wallet, CA wallet creation fee is xx USD causal). And when EOA sends an asset to CA, theoretically this CA can become an account abstract wallet.

The account abstraction wallet can be understood as a decentralized "bank". EOA can put assets in this "bank", and just notify the "bank" when transfer is required, and the "bank" will complete the transfer operation. In this way, value transfer and information transfer no longer occur simultaneously on EOA, but on an abstract account. Of course, these transactions will always require an EOA signature to execute.

Core topic 2: How is the function of account abstraction realized?

Following the announcement of the EIP-4337 protocol, the hype (or deification) of the abstract concept of accounts in the capital market has reached its peak, and the most commendable ones are [Social Login] [Social Recovery] [Unfamiliar Device Recovery] [Transfer without handling fees] However, in fact, the contract account (CA) itself is a decentralized product, and the operation of the transaction on the asset chain still needs to be executed through the EOA signature, so it is completely carried out through tools such as web 2.0 information, biological information, and authenticators.【 Social login/recovery] must cooperate with centralized services, which is why V God "even encourages users to give up some privacy" as mentioned above.

However, [Strange Device Recovery], a controversial function in the EOA wallet (for example: the private key recovery service launched by the Ledger wallet), can be realized in the CA wallet by writing the bound backup EOA in the smart contract. There is no need to hand over any sensitive information to the wallet operator, and there is no need to transfer any private information, so it is safer than the recovery function launched by the EOA wallet.

Finally, how is [transfer without handling fee] realized? First of all, everyone should pay attention to an important point: CA wallet and account abstraction (AA) wallet can only run on public chains that support EVM at present, and the main battlefield must be Ethereum. As we all know, before the implementation of the EIP-1559 proposal, the POW miners of Ethereum can freely choose an on-chain transaction to pack for free, but after the EIP-1559 proposal is passed, the base fee must be paid due to deflation and combustion, causing Ethereum There are no truly free transactions on the web. Next, Cregis Research will analyze in detail how the AA wallet [transfer without handling fee] is realized:

First, take the USDT smart contract as an example: it contains code and data, and the data part can be understood as a table that records how many USDT each EOA owns, that is, the balance of each EOA. When transferring money, the balance of one account is deducted and the balance of the other account is added.

At this time, we substitute game-fi or social-fi scenarios. The project side hopes to lower the threshold so that users can participate without holding gas fees. Although it cannot be done in the current Ethereum network EOA, smart scientists still I thought of an indirect solution: Meta Tx & Gas station network (GSN), the principle is that the token trader (Zhang San) signs and executes a transaction-like structured data (mdata), and then sends it to the person willing to pay the gas fee ( Li Si), Li Si sends the transaction containing mdata to the smart contract compatible with GSN for execution, and pays the gas fee on the chain.

The above solution is an important part of the EIP-4337 proposal. The EIP-4337 proposal is a transaction optimization scheme that does not change the Ethereum consensus layer: when a user wants to initiate a transaction, TA will only need to send a msg, but this msg is not sent to the Ethereum mainnet, so the user does not need to pay gas fee; this msg will be sent to a memory pool, where it will be authenticated according to the EIP-4337 standard, and if it is confirmed to be correct, it will be packaged by the operator’s EOA and published to the Ethereum chain, and finally the consensus node will Enter the transaction into the block. In addition, the EIP-4337 proposal also includes a series of operation standards such as what benefits the packager can obtain, and how to refund if the packaging fails. If the method of hiding the association between the operator's EOA and msg is added to the EIP-4337 proposal, It can also realize the function of private transaction.

Mystery solved: account abstraction (AA) wallet = contract account (CA) + off-chain communication standard

After the analysis, I believe everyone understands that although the content of the EIP-4337 proposal may take 11 to 13 months to be fully completed, the account abstraction (AA) wallet is not only realized through the EIP-4337 protocol, so there are indeed The genuine AA wallet product, but the EIP-4337 protocol is likely to be the most recognized operating standard and solution.

Cregis can provide CA wallet and GSN service (CA wallet is optional in privatization deployment, and the GSN function was deployed on the TRON network in April this year, saving customers 1.93 million TRX so far), but it did not launch the market immediately , Reason: Worried that the business plan does not match the standards in the EIP-4337 protocol.

Gnosis Safe, a well-known multi-signature wallet operator, also realizes the multi-signature function through the contract account (CA). It is also not eager to launch the AA wallet. It is speculated that there may be concerns in this regard.

Core topic three: Is the AA wallet really perfect? What are the disadvantages?

The advantages of AA wallets are many, but they are not perfect. A week ago, God Vitalik commented on CA and MPC based EOA on his Twitter AMA. Various masters also discussed in depth on this Twitter. Here are a few objective flaws for everyone:

• The cost of creating a CA is high, and the more prosperous (more congested) the Ethereum network is, the more expensive it will be;
• The security of CA depends on the builder of the smart contract. If there is a loophole in the smart contract or the builder leaves a malicious backdoor, the security of user assets is at risk. The staking contract of the cross-chain bridge is also a CA. The theft of the cross-chain bridge and the huge amount of stolen assets that frequently hit the headlines are all risk warnings for the CA wallet;
• Calling the CA wallet relies on the EOA signature. The EOA generated through the seed phrase needs a private key to be signed. If the private key is not kept properly, it will still be stolen, and the security logic has not been upgraded;

Cregis Research, as one of the onlookers of this popular AMA, believes that there is no absolute safe path in the blockchain world, and it is the responsibility of each user to make a balance between convenience and security; and to choose Cregis It is Cregis' responsibility to provide users with more secure and convenient tools.

Closing: About Cregis Research

Cregis is an asset management collaboration platform in the web 3.0 era. It provides enterprise-level wallets + financial SaaS tools. It has been operating safely for 6 years and has created 5.87 million active blockchain addresses for customers. It has processed assets on the chain every day in the past 12 months $33 million.

Cregis Research is its knowledge sharing platform, hoping to provide Web 3.0 enthusiasts with 0 moisture, 0 misleading, and 0 commercially inclined scientific content about blockchain and the underlying technology of cryptography.

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