How Ethereum EIP-7702 Boosts Wallet UX with Minimal Downsides

• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has launched a proposal to improve the wallet experience of crypto users.
• The new proposal, dubbed EIP-7702, rivals EIP-3074, which has come into focus recently.
• The recent proposal has sparked a debate over which should be included in Ethereum’s next upgrade.

Ethereum is hunting for a halfway solution to improve the user experience of traditional wallets.

Until recently, EIP-3074 was the major contender to fill the gap, and it had already been earmarked for the network’s next upgrade, known as Pectra. But just as users were digesting the implications of EIP-3074, a competing proposal from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin arrived on the scene: EIP-7702.

How do the rival EIPs compare?

A Less Disruptive and More Future-Proof Change?

First proposed in 2020, EIP-3074 intends to allow users of traditional wallets to enjoy the same benefits as smart wallets created in 2023 by EIP-4337. These benefits include the ability to batch transactions, sponsor transactions of one wallet, and recover wallet addresses with social recovery tools. The proposal makes code changes to the EVM , allowing users to delegate wallet control to smart contracts called invokers.

Despite the potential benefits, EIP-3074 raises security and forward compatibility concerns . The security concerns come from market participants fearing that many users could lose their assets by delegating to malicious invokers. To address this, however, wallets will likely create a trusted list of invokers from which to choose. On the other hand, addressing forward compatibility concerns has yet to be as straightforward. 

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With the network eventually intending to fully transition to smart wallets under EIP-4337, building with EIP-3074 could lead to interoperability issues in the future. Enter EIP-7702.

Proposed on Tuesday , May 7, by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and co-authors Sam Wilson, Ansgar Dietrichs, and Matt Garnett, EIP-7702 intends to realize all the benefits of EIP-3074 without the forward compatibility concerns. Instead of making code changes to the EVM, EIP-7702 defines a new transaction type that allows users to temporarily populate the existing “contract_code” field in traditional wallets with smart contract code for a given transaction, effectively converting the wallet to a smart contract wallet for the duration of the transaction. 

Explaining how EIP-7702 addresses the issue of compatibility with EIP-4337 in a HackMD post on Tuesday, Buterin wrote :

"The contract code that users would need to sign could literally be existing ERC-4337 wallet code."

With EIP-7702 offering a less disruptive and more forward-proof change, it has already begun to garner significant support within the Ethereum community.

EIP-7702 To Make It to Pectra?

Highlighting the level of support being seen by EIP-7702, Safe co-founder Lukas Schor asserted that it was even receiving support from proponents of EIP-3074.

At the same time, some community members have begun advocating for the inclusion of EIP-7702 over EIP-3074 in Pectra. 

Whether the EIP will be included in the proposal could be determined in the All Core Developers Execution (ACDE) meeting scheduled for Thursday, May 9.

On the Flipside 

• EIP-7702 is still in the draft stage, meaning its authors can freely edit it.

Why This Matters 

As the crypto space matures and looks to go mainstream, a key hurdle has been how to abstract away the complexities of the technology. For users of the Ethereum network, this discussion has often settled around how users store their crypto assets and perform transactions, leading to the rise of a concept called account abstraction. EIP-7702 promises to give users of traditional Ethereum wallets the benefits of smart contract wallets while not compromising the network’s account abstraction roadmap.

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