After a technical proposal to improve Ethereum wallets faced opposition, Vitalik Buterin, the blockchain’s co-founder, developed a new proposal last week.
The story began last month when Ethereum developers decided to include a proposal to improve EIP-3074 in the next major update to the network, known as the Pectra hard fork. EIP-3074 aims to make it so that some wallet functions can be controlled by smart contracts, part of a broader technology transition called account abstraction. This transition was supposed to turn Ethereum external account (EOA) wallets, the most popular on the blockchain, into smart contract wallets.
However, after the release of EIP-3074, some community members praised the proposal, while others expressed dissatisfaction. The main concern was its incompatibility with an earlier proposal called ERC-4437, which had been on the mainnet since February 2023.
Just a couple of days after the release of EIP-3074, Buterin co-authored an alternative proposal, EIP-7702, which may replace the original in the upcoming Pectra update.
Ansgar Dietrichs, the Ethereum core developer who co-wrote EIP-3074 and EIP-7702 with Buterin, explained in a chat interview with CoinDesk that the new proposal was “the result of about a week of being involved in a conversation about account abstraction research.”
According to Dietrichs, after the study was completed, Buterin “really accelerated the process of writing this EIP.” “I asked him to do it in 15 minutes,” Dietrich recalls. “It took him 22.”
Since the release of EIP-7702, many have praised the alternative, and it looks like it will replace the original EIP-3074.
For now, EIP-3074 is still scheduled to launch alongside Pectra. However, things could change once the details of EIP-7702 are worked out.
“People still understand the differences from 3074,” Dietrich told CoinDesk. “But I would say it’s very likely we will replace the 3074 with it.”
Galaxy’s Kim suggested that the episode serves as an example of how Ethereum’s decentralized governance works in practice.
