Ethereum account abstraction, or smart accounts, will be shipped with the Hegota upgrade “within a year,” said Vitalik Buterin on Saturday.

“We have been talking about account abstraction ever since early 2016,” said the Ethereum co-founder over the weekend. 

He added that now, “we finally have EIP-8141, an omnibus that wraps up and solves every remaining problem that AA [account abstraction] was intended to address (plus more),” and it is slated for deployment this year.  

“Finally, after over a decade of research and refinement of these techniques, this all looks possible to make happen within a year (Hegota fork).”

The core concept is “about as simple as you can get while still being highly general purpose,” using “frame transactions,” explained Buterin. 

Instead of a transaction being a single operation, it becomes a sequence of “frames” that can reference each other’s data, and each frame can signal authorization of a sender or gas payer. 

A core principle of cypherpunk Ethereum

Smart accounts with multi-signatures, quantum-resistant wallets, and accounts with changeable keys work by having a validation frame, which checks the signature and approves it, followed by an execution frame. 

Paying gas in non-ETH tokens can be done via a “paymaster contract” or a special-purpose decentralized exchange that provides Ether (ETH) in real time, with no intermediaries required, which is a big deal for Ethereum’s ethos, said Vitalik.  

“Intermediary minimization is a core principle of non-ugly cypherpunk Ethereum: maximize what you can do even if all the world’s infrastructure except the Ethereum chain itself goes down.”

Related: Vitalik Buterin outlines quantum resistance roadmap for Ethereum

Buterin explained that this was also a big deal for privacy protocol users, as it means they can completely remove “public broadcasters” that are the “source of massive UX pain” in privacy platforms such as Railgun and Tornado Cash, and replace them with a “general-purpose public mempool.”

Quantum-resistant Ethereum in the pipeline

All Ethereum accounts, including existing ones, can be put into the same framework and gain the ability to do batch operations and transaction sponsorship, he said. 

The Ethereum co-founder posted his quantum resistance roadmap for Ethereum on Thursday, stating that the four areas of concern were validator signatures, data storage, user account signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs.

He also said that he expects to see “progressive decreases” of both slot time and finality time in the longer-term scaling roadmap. 

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