Ethereum Upgrades Smart Accounts for Lower Gas Costs

The Ethereum Foundation is preparing for a substantial upgrade of the account abstraction standard within the Ethereum network to improve efficiency and ease gas consumption. Particularly, this will focus on minimizing the use of gas for layer-2 networks.

Gas Reduction Tactics

On 10th January, the Ethereum Foundation gave a sneak preview of the substantial revisions to the ERC-4337 standard specification, a collar around account abstraction commonly called smart accounts.

The next version, v0.7, encompasses learnings from nine months of real-world use of ERC-4337, developer John Rising says in an update shared exclusively.

One key change involves restructuring account abstraction transactions that are more complex than standard Ether transactions. The important change details five gas values rather than the prior single value. John Rising explained,

“User has to specify more than one checked gas value in case the account can do computation while its signature is being checked.”

Further explaining the need for the multiple gas value, Rising said,

“With smart accounts, users can have many different types of signatures and pay for gas in many ways. This means that the amount of gas required varies, and the transaction must specify how much it will spend for this validation.”

Efficiency Gains on Layer-2 Networks

This change brings about the first benefit of a more precise estimate of gas to reduce the amount of spent gas. Specifically, in layer 2 for networks, these changes will lead to a reduction in gas costs. This is because they facilitate seamless transaction data, thereby reducing the overall data that needs to be published. Rising pointed out,

“The prime benefits of v0.7 for users will be lower gas fees. It uses some tricks to use transaction data, particularly on layer-2 blockchains more effectively.”

The updated specification has an additional feature: all unused gas in computation incurs a 10% penalty. This measure discourages applications from submitting transactions with unnecessarily overestimated gas limits.

Account abstraction, also known as the idea of smart accounts, brings programmable logic and rules into basic Ethereum accounts. It enables the account to react to incoming transactions. This way, the simple account will remove tediousness and break up countless previously impossible scenarios.

Vitalik Buterin and other developers introduced account abstraction in September 2021. It transformed accounts in Ethereum from passive and static entities to active and programmable execution entities in the EIP-4337.

The Ethereum Foundation has announced the start of a security audit, keeping the date of version v0.7 obscured. John Rising commented,

“My guess is that ETHDenver will finalize everything at the end of February.”

Related Reading | Coinbase and Yellow Card Unite to Boost Crypto Access