we understand what Account Abstraction is and how it will help make self-custody wallets mainstream
self-custody wallet – this is when the user manages his passwords himself, that is, if the password is lost, forgotten, burned out, the wallet will not help to restore it in any way and access to the funds is lost (does not sound user-friendly)
philosophical and practical introduction
today in various chats and twitters there is an opinion that if you remove the seed phrase from the non-custodial wallet (or add the restore function), this will immediately drive the mass adoption to heaven. I don’t think that this will immediately greatly increase the mass adoption (or somehow increase it at all, because the user (in his mass sense) does not want to know what is custodial and what is non-custodial, he does not want to know anything at all , he wants to solve some particular problem of his own, for the solution of which he may need a wallet) what am I talking about: this is definitely not a panacea and not a magic pill, but in the long term — this is an important (very important) element. by the way, why do I love the crypto industry with its crypto winters — only those who are willing to gamble remain.
so, Account Abstraction
There are two types of accounts:
EOA – Externally Owned Accounts – an account that is managed by someone who owns a private key
SA – Contract Accounts – a smart contract deployed on the network that manages the code
State (state) EOA account can be modified only through a new transaction, and a new transaction can only be initiated by some kind of EOA. That is, when the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) executes a transaction, the first EOA that the EVM touches is the initiator of the transaction (for banquet gas is paid by this account).
When the EVM receives a transaction request, it checks the validity of the signature (private key) of the sender, and also checks that the element nonce* transaction corresponds to the nonce element of the account, then executes the transaction, then charges the transaction fee from the sender’s account.
*nonce — abbreviation for the phrase ‘number used once’, a randomly generated number proving that the function or value was used only once.
the live account has:
state (state): balance + nonce
ability to validate and execute transactions
address (fyi: wallet address is the last 20 bytes of the public key) associated (paired?) with the private key
And here it is important to clarify this property: if Vasya has a private key, then you have an account (regardless of how many and what apps he uses for this account and whether he uses apps at all). But if Vasya and Katya have the same private key, then they both own the account.
We have described the logic of EOA accounts as it is today
The main problem that this logic gives rise to:
if Vasya had a private key from the account, and then Vasya went to a cryptorave and lost the private key there, then Vasya no longer has an account (and Vasya also does not have all the funds that Vasya had on his account). But if Stephen found Vasya’s private key on a crypto-rave, then now Vasya’s former account has become Stephen’s current account (and all means too)
What is the proposed alternative:
Once again, in the case of EOA: account = signature
Account Abstarction proposes to separate these two elements, that is, keeping assets separately, and signing transactions separately
How is this possible
Instead of an account, a smart contract appears that will check the validity of the transaction and execute it. Thanks to this, it becomes possible to “customize” an account for different needs: use a different encryption model (ECDSA is used on the air today), multisig (to authorize a transaction, it must be signed by a certain number of accounts, say 3 out of 5), up to the fact that a new signer transactions are assigned every week
To date, there are two key players working with Account Abstraction: StarkNet and zkSync 2.0, the most sounding smart contract walllet of every iron is Argent, another smart contract walllet is Ambire (probably there are more, this is the first thing that comes to mind) .
More about web3 in simple words in the channel millennials make web3
