Ethereum integrates EIP-3074 proposal into Pectra hard fork to enhance user experience
Following today's Ethereum developer team meeting (12/04), the EIP-3074 proposal has been officially included in the upcoming significant hard fork named Pectra.
Ethereum integrates EIP-3074 proposal into Pectra hard fork to enhance user experience. Photo: The Block
Tim Beiko (a key member of the Ethereum Core Devs community) shared in a recent tweet that Client teams favor the approach of EIP-3074. Accordingly, this proposal will be incorporated into Ethereum's next hard fork, named Pectra.
Fundamentally, EIP-3074 aims to address:
- Bundling individual transactions (token permissions, bridges, swaps, etc.) to streamline operations for users.
- Backup mechanisms for wallet recovery in case users forget their private keys.
- Dapps can sponsor gas fees for users when there is insufficient ETH in their wallets.
We then discussed EIP-3074, which all client teams had flagged as one they'd like to include. Reth's original post mentioned more Account Abstraction-related EIPs, but after having spent the past few months reviewing them, @gakonst confirmed 3074 was also their preferred approach
— timbeiko.eth (@TimBeiko) April 11, 2024
However, it's important to clarify that EIP-3074 and ERC-4337 will have some differences, although both aim to improve the user experience with cryptocurrency wallets.
EIP-3074 remains strictly an Externally Owned Address (EOA), rather than transforming into a Smart Contract Wallet like ERC-4337. This means if an EOA wallet's private key is compromised, the assets in the wallet can still be stolen as usual, without the added protection layers of Smart Contract wallets.
This is how the 3074 flow works:
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) April 11, 2024
- User signs a message (off-chain, not a tx)
- User or sponsor sends the message to an invoker contract as a tx
- Invoker uses AUTH and AUTHCALL to verify and call each target contract with the user's address as the sender pic.twitter.com/S0lLh0RnfT
ERC-4337 is a token standard deployed on the Ethereum mainnet in March 2023. However, both ERC-4337 and EIP-3074 are just pieces, small features of Account Abstraction and are often misunderstood with this concept. Implementing full Account Abstraction (AA) on Ethereum is currently challenging due to fragmentation in the design structure.
There are several downsides to 3074 that we should be cognizant of.
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) April 11, 2024
The biggest one is around invokers - these need to be fully audited, non-upgradeable, and trustless otherwise user's funds easily be stolen.
Additionally, some existing reentrancy checks may not work with 3074. pic.twitter.com/3XDBp6TATi
Returning to EIP-3074, the Ethereum community has also been discussing potential limitations and risks associated with this change.
Specifically, the Invoker phase—where delegations execute user transactions bundled together—may pose risks. Without proper auditing and transparency in handling changes to user assets during this phase, incidents of mis-signing by malicious Invokers could lead to asset loss.
downside of EIP 3074 is that now it'll be possible to fully drain an address (all tokens, all nfts, all defi positions...) with only one bad signature
— 0xngmi (@0xngmi) April 11, 2024
Related to the Pectra hard fork, the Ethereum community had previously proposed integrating the EIP-7251 upgrade. This proposal aims to increase the limit of available ETH for staking on Ethereum, thereby optimizing the Validator setup for operating entities.
