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636 days ago

Gelato & Safe are bringing Account Abstraction to Coinbase’s upcoming L2 - Base

TL;DR

  • Gelato and Safe are enabling web3 developers to utilize Account Abstraction on Base for the launch of the Base Goerli Testnet for ETH Denver
  • Safe will deploy their smart contract wallet infrastructure, which currently secures over $36bn of assets, to Base
  • Gelato has already executed over 4 million transactions, and has started running Base Nodes and deployed their battle-tested transaction relaying network to Base
  • Developers will be able to use a single powerful SDK in order to get all the features of Account Abstraction out of the box for the launch of the Base testnet

What is Account Abstraction?

The concept of Account Abstraction has been a major focus of the Ethereum Developer Community for the past year and a lot of progress has been made to finally enable users to enjoy a better user experience when interacting with decentralized applications (dApps).

Account Abstraction refers to using smart contract wallets as first class citizens instead of Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs), combined with a reliable transaction relaying infrastructure that enables third parties to execute transactions on behalf of users.

This combination enables features such as users not being required to own the native asset to pay for transaction fees, recovering wallets in case a private key has been lost, and batched transactions for a simpler UX, among many others. Read this thread or watch this video to get a better understanding of why Account Abstraction is a game changer for web3 UX and how it works.

Even though initiatives like ERC4337 are on route to be adopted by Ethereum in the near future, developers are in need of access to required tools to make effective use of it already today.

Gelato and Safe will bring their Account Abstraction infrastructure and developer SDK to the Base Testnet just in time for ETH Denver. Developers can now start building applications using smart contract wallets as first class citizens on Base right from the start.

Why Account Abstraction will be a game changer for L2s

Account Abstraction at its core solves an important issue of defining a common standard of how smart contracts can interact with dApps without the need for a user to use their EOA to send and pay for transactions. However, even though this concept, known as meta-transactions, has already been present on Ethereum for multiple years, adoption of smart contract wallets as a first-class citizen, other than for the purpose of multi-sigs, has been nearly nonexistent.

This is mostly due to two major limitations that chains like Ethereum face:

  1. High gas costs associated with deploying smart contract wallets and sponsoring transactions, preventing dApps from introducing this friction in the onboarding process on their dApps.

  2. Front end developers have to build their UI with two distinct users in mind, smart contract wallet users and EOA users, which introduces major developer complexity and maintenance problems.

Base will help mitigate these challenges in two ways:

  • As Base will be its own L2, transaction fees will be significantly lower than on Ethereum, making deploying smart contract wallets for all users and sponsoring transactions finally practical at a larger scale.
  • Base has the advantage of starting with a “clean slate,” which lets developers build dApps with Account Abstraction already in mind. They will not have to focus and deal with the complexity of building dApps that support “legacy” EOA accounts, thus skipping a lot of the technical debt that creates a lot of the front end complexity.

We believe that L2s like Base will accelerate the adoption of smart contract based wallets. We are excited to work with Gelato, Safe, and the incredible ecosystem of developers building Account Abstraction tools to make wallets more usable.

--Jesse Pollak, Base Lead

How developers can use Account Abstraction on Base

Web3 developers will be able to use a developer SDK that combines all the necessary features into one simple NPM package. Supported features of this SDK include Social Onboarding, gasless transactions and fiat on-ramping.

The Base, Safe and Gelato teams will all provide bounties for hackers at ETHDenver to build interesting use cases that showcase the power of Accounts Abstraction in combination with cheap transactions on the Base L2.

Want to experiment with Account Abstraction on Base?

Join the Discords of the projects in order to ask questions and get all the necessary information about the required tools to get started using Account Abstraction on Base.

About Gelato

Gelato is a Web3 Cloud Platform empowering developers to create automated, gasless, and off-chain-aware Layer 2 chains and smart contracts. Over 400 web3 projects rely on Gelato for years to facilitate millions of transactions in DeFi, NFTs, and gaming.

  • Gelato RaaS: Deploy your own tailor-made ZK or OP L2 chains in a single click with native Account Abstraction and all Gelato middleware baked in.

  • Web3 Functions: Connect your smart contracts to off-chain data & computation by running decentralized cloud functions.

  • Automate: Automate your smart contracts by executing transactions automatically in a reliable, developer-friendly & decentralized manner.

  • Relay: Give your users access to reliable, robust, and scalable gasless transactions via a simple-to-use API.

  • Account Abstraction SDK: Gelato has partnered with Safe, to build a fully-fledged Account Abstraction SDK, combining Gelato's industry's best gasless transaction capabilities, with the industry's most secure smart contract wallet.

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