Part I: WTF is Account Abstraction

The narrative of ownership is integral to decentralized financial technology. Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database, which can notionally be withdrawn or exchanged for goods and services at any point. As the story goes, this requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protoco... See more

With that, we'll have to be careful about introducing thoughtful abstraction—simplifying and hiding complexity without diluting the essence of web3 or taking away control when it might be valued.

Separating "login" from "data" is powerful and attractive. Currently, we need to create an account with every app and website we use. And we need to let these apps store our data on their own servers. On the blockchain-powered web, people use a single private key (and wallet) to log in to many different apps, and their data and history belong to th... See more

...blockchain-based accounts are particularly apt at persistent pseudonymity through providing a public, pseudonymous, and cross-platform address that displays its actions over time, what Shreyas Hariharan calls on-chain reputation. What we need, then, is a technical stack that supports not an identity, but a collection of identities to navigate th... See more

Blockchain-based accounts are one potentially well-posed solution to the needs outlined above, offering self-custodial data and universal login. Today, creating an Ethereum-based account does not require entering any personal data, and a subject may create an unlimited number of accounts, each represented by a unique address.

The bottom line: Moving identity on-chain, and thereby removing the possibility of users-table-centric network effects, completely up-ends the entire landscape of API-based, access-controlled interoperability that the present Internet is built on. All of the non-technical market and political dynamics around users table size, leverage, and risk sud... See more

"If we could re-architect all asset ownership systems today without any historical baggage, how would we do it? On a technical basis, the answer is actually quite clear (if you don’t fully understand the next paragraph, that’s ok):