Account Abstraction

Learn more about Account Abstraction on Boba Network

In general there are two types of accounts on Ethereum:

1. Contract Accounts (CA)

2. Externally Owned Accounts (EOA)

As the name suggests, EOAs are owned by something external to the blockchain - users just like you.

Externally Owned Accounts have 3 main properties:

1. The balance of the networks native coin available to the account

2. The nonce to ensure the uniqueness of every transaction

3. The address to uniquely identify the account

While a Contract Account is an account with code (smart contract) that executes when it receives a transaction. Like an EOA, a contract account can also hold ether and can be made to trigger arbitrary transactions. But a contract account needs to be controlled with an EOA.

What is Account Abstraction

Account Abstraction is a way to unify the two account types into a single type of account - a smart contract account (upon full enforcement), and the way to access/control/use this account is freely customizable. The account, with code and open-ended access methods allows for a range of new features to be built on the chain and make life on-chain easier.

Why we need Account Abstraction

Account Abstraction offers many advantages, a few are listed below and we suggest having a look at the official documentation as well.

• Multisig authorization

• Account freezing

• Account recovery

• Setting transaction limits

• Creating whitelists

• Paying Tx fees in alternate token

• Sponsoring Tx fees for users

• Social login

• Different Signature Schemes

High Level Architecture

Account Abstraction under ERC-4337 consists of five major components:

1. UserOperation: Pseudo-transaction objects that express a user's intent

2. Bundler: Facilitating a transaction's path to finality

3. EntryPoint: Global contract to validate and execute UserOps

4. Aggregators: Aggregating UserOp signatures

5. Paymasters: Sponsoring user transactions