Account abstraction, the new shiny object in crypto
Search “account abstraction” on the bird app and you will find one of the hottest product discussions going on in crypto right now. The hopes for account abstraction (AA) range from simply improving the usability of blockchains to unlocking a whole new world of functionality that will finally bring about true mass adoption.It’s hard not to get excited by the possibilities, but then you start to look at some of the live examples of AA and the hype seems a bit overblown. In their quest to obscure the seedphrase, product teams have made big compromises on privacy, they’ve asked users to place trust in opaque or unknowable third parties, and they’ve constructed key management schemas that are not compatible with existing wallet standards.It’s important to distinguish these efforts from the hopes for what may be possible after a critical upgrade to Ethereum, which can’t come soon enough.When setting up your typical non custodial wallet, you are given a pair of keys: a public key and a private key. You may receive funds by sharing your public key with the sender. But you can only initiate a send by authenticating (or signing) the private key, which you alone posses. This top level of wallet ownership is also known as an Externally Owned Account (EOA).One common form of AA gives the user the option to save their private key in the cloud and authenticate it with a username and password. Some may quibble over whether this even qualifies as AA. I would argue that it does in the sense that it removes the need to write down and secure a seedphrase and gives the user a familiar pattern with which to authenticate and recover their private key.Using this method, the private key is broken up into multiple “key shares,” a certain threshold of which (usually two of three) must be authenticated to reconstitute the whole private key.
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