Ethereum
Vitalik Buterin’s 22-Minute Ethereum Wallet Proposal Receives Positive Reviews
After a technical proposition to improve Ethereum wallets has encountered some opposition, a well-known figure stepped in last week to design an alternative: none other than Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the blockchain.
It would have taken him 22 minutes.
The origin of the story dates back to last month, when Ethereum developers decided to include Ethereum enhancement proposal EIP-3074 – allowing certain functions of wallets to be controlled by smart contracts – in its next big network upgrade, known as the Pectra hard fork.
The work to make Ethereum wallets less cumbersome is part of a technology movement called account abstractionin which Ethereum External Account (EOA) wallets, the most popular on the blockchain, are transformed into smart contract wallets.
After EIP-3074 was released, some community members welcomed the proposal, while others expressed displeasure. The main concern was that it was not compatible with an earlier proposal, called ERC-4437, which was I’ve been on the mainnet since February 2023.
A few days after the release of EIP-3074, Buterin co-wrote a new one, EIP-7702which constitutes an alternative to what is now included in the next update of Pectra.
Ethereum lead developer Ansgar Dietrichs, who co-wrote EIP-3074 and EIP-7702 with Buterin, said in an interview with CoinDesk via chat that the latest proposal was “the result of about a week of his involvement in research on account abstraction”. conversation.”
Once the research was done, Dietrichs said, Buterin “effectively sped up the process of writing this EIP.”
“I challenged him to do it in 15 years,” Dietrichs recalled. “It took him 22.”
Since the release of the EIP-7702, many have praised this alternative, and it seems likely that it will replace the original EIP-3074.
“There is positive sentiment among all stakeholder groups” toward Buterin’s alternative, wrote Christine Kim, vice president of research at digital asset firm Galaxy, in a research note from May 20.
Jarrod Watts, developer relations engineer at Polygon, written on X that “This is one of the most impactful changes Ethereum will have… EVER.”
For now, EIP-3074 is still considered operational with Pectra. This may change once the details of EIP-7022 are ironed out.
“People are still understanding the exact differences with 3074,” Dietrichs told CoinDesk. “But I would say it is very likely that we will replace the 3074 with this one.”
Galaxy’s Kim suggested that the episode offered an example of how Ethereum’s decentralized governance works in practice.
“This can result in a constructive dialogue between different stakeholder groups in an open source project that ultimately results in a new path forward with higher consensus than before among participants,” Kim wrote.
Once Buterin got involved, it didn’t take long.