Ethereum Reaching End Game? Founder Vitalik Buterin Shares New Development

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has provided an update on plans for account abstraction. Given the progress they have made so far on this feature, he stated that it could go live within a year under the Hegota upgrade. 

Vitalik Buterin Provides Update On Ethereum Account Abstraction

In an X post, Vitalik Buterin noted that they have made progress with the account abstraction proposal, which they have been working on since early 2016. There is now the EIP-8141 proposal, which the Ethereum co-founder said solves every remaining problem that account abstraction is intended to solve. 

Account abstraction enables smart contracts to initiate and validate transactions. This upgrade will enable users to automate payments from their wallets while still retaining control of their funds. Vitalik Buterin drew attention to “Frame Transactions,” which enables native account abstraction. One key component of this Ethereum feature is that users can now pay gas fees in tokens other than ETH via the paymaster contract. 

Vitalik Buterin gave an example of users wanting to pay gas in RAI, an Ethereum-backed asset. He stated that one can use a paymaster contract, which is a special-purpose DEX that provides ETH in real time. The Ethereum co-founder broke down the transaction frames, which include deployment, validation, paymaster validation, and then the user sends RAI to the payment, after which execution occurs. The paymaster then refunds unused RAI and converts it to ETH. 

The founder’s comments come amid the Ethereum Foundation’s release of the ‘Strawmap,’ which outlines the network’s plans through 2029 as developers work on aspects such as finality and transaction speed. The Strawmap also showed that native account abstraction could happen by the second half of this year. 

How This Aligns With The Cypherpunk ETH Vision

Vitalik Buterin said that account abstraction minimizes intermediaries, a core principle of “non-ugly cypherpunk Ethereum,” which maximizes what users can do even if all the world’s infrastructure except Ethereum goes down. This came as the Ethereum co-founder noted that the mechanism for account abstraction is the same as in existing sponsored transaction mechanisms, but with no intermediaries required. 

The Ethereum co-founder also touched on how account abstraction will work for privacy protocols, noting that there are two strategies in focus. The first is creating a paymaster contract that checks for a valid ZK-SNARK and pays gas if it finds one. The second strategy is to add 2D nonces, which would enable an individual account to function as a privacy protocol and to receive transactions in parallel for many users. 

Vitalik Buterin stated that for privacy protocol users, this strategy means that they can completely remove “public broadcasters” that are the source of “massive UX pain” and replace them with a general-purpose public mempool

At the time of writing, the ETH price is trading at around $2,000, up in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.