Ethereum Developers Introduce EIP-3074 to Enhance Crypto Wallets

The Ethereum community is divided over EIP-3074, a code change to enhance user experience with blockchain wallets.

As blockchain developers aim for mainstream adoption, improving the usability of crypto wallets has become a top priority.

Ethereum developers are progressing with their discussions and including specific Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIPs) for the blockchain’s upcoming major hard fork, Pectra.

One of these proposals, EIP-3074, has garnered support and concern within the Ethereum community. This code change is intended to enhance user experience with blockchain wallets.

Previously, Ethereum developers addressed issues to simplify the wallet user experience and deployed features unlocking new capabilities. They are striving to make the experience even more user-friendly and permanently embedded in the blockchain.

EIP-3074 is designed to make a specific type of wallet, known as externally owned accounts (EOAs), more programmable by authorising smart contracts.

Ethereum has two wallet accounts: EOAs, such as MetaMask and Coinbase wallet, and smart contract wallets like Argent and Safe.

EOA account users have a public and private key pair. However, if the private key to an EOA account is lost, no help desk or key recovery process is available to regain access to the funds.

Previous proposals, like ERC-4337, aimed to make EOAs easier to use, introducing the concept of account abstraction (AA) and allowing users to recover their crypto with smart contract features.

EIP-3074 represents another innovation in this realm, allowing transaction capabilities to be delegated to smart contracts. The proposal enables users to batch transactions together and sign off once. Additionally, it allows third parties to sponsor users’ transaction fees, covering gas costs for their users.

EIP-3074 also permits users to sign transactions submitted by a different party, such as signing transactions from a different interface or signing them offline.

However, while many community members support the proposal, others have raised concerns, particularly regarding the security implications of the batched transactions feature.

Lukas Schor, co-founder at Safe, has expressed concerns about the proposal’s lack of a clear pathway to full account abstraction and its potential negative impact on AA adoption.

Itamar Lesuisse, co-founder of Argent wallet, has raised security concerns, highlighting the risk of allowing scammers to drain entire wallets with a single off-chain signature.

For security reasons, experts called for wallets to ban EIP-3074 MAGIC signatures on a per-wallet basis.