Tech
Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum Wallet proposal, scribbled in 22 minutes, gets positive reviews
After a technical proposal To improve wallets Ethereum has faced some opposition, a familiar figure stepped in last week to devise an alternative: none other than Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the blockchain.
It reportedly took him 22 minutes.
The origin of the story dates back to last month, when the developers of Ethereum decided to include Proposed Ethereum enhancement EIP-3074 – which allows control of certain functions in wallets via smart contracts – in its next major network upgrade, known as the Pectra hard fork.
The work to make Ethereum wallets less cumbersome is part of a technology move called account abstractionwhere Ethereum Externally Owned Account (EOA) wallets, the most popular on the blockchain, are transformed into smart contract wallets.
After EIP-3074 was released, some in the community praised the proposal, while others expressed their disappointment. The main concern was that it was not compatible with an earlier proposal, called ERC-4437, which has I’ve been on the mainnet ever since February 2023.
A couple of days after the release of EIP-3074, Buterin wrote a new one, EIP-7702which serves as an alternative to what is now included in the file next Pectra update.
Ethereum lead developer Ansgar Dietrichs, who co-wrote EIP-3074 and EIP-7702 with Buterin, said in an interview with CoinDesk via chat that the latest proposal was “the result of a week or so of been involved in research on conversational account abstraction.”
Once the research was finished, Dietrichs said, Buterin “actually accelerated the process of writing the EIP.”
“I challenged him to do it in 15,” Dietrichs recalled. “It took him 22 years.”
Since the release of the EIP-7702, many have praised the alternative and it seems likely that it will replace the original EIP-3074.
“There is positive sentiment among all stakeholder groups” for Buterin’s alternative, wrote Christine Kim, vice president of research at digital asset firm Galaxy, in a May 20 research note.
Jarrod Watts, Polygon’s developer relations engineer, he wrote X that “It’s one of the most impactful changes Ethereum will have… EVER.”
For now, EIP-3074 is still believed to be operational with Pectra. This may change once the details of EIP-7022 are worked out.
“People are still understanding the exact differences compared to the 3074,” Dietrichs told CoinDesk. “But I would say it is very likely that we will replace the 3074 with it.”
Galaxy’s Kim suggested that the episode offers an example of how Ethereum’s decentralized governance works in practice.
“It can lead to a constructive dialogue between different stakeholder groups in an open source project that ultimately results in a new path with higher consensus among participants than before,” Kim wrote.
Once Buterin got involved, it didn’t take long.