ERC-4437 Adoption on Ethereum: A Sobering Reality
Ethereum account abstraction advocate John Rising has shared some “sobering” numbers showing overall ERC-4437 adoption has been far from ideal. In a Nov. 14 post on X (formerly Twitter), Rising shared data points that showed ERC-4337-enabled smart accounts suffered a decline in users, low transaction activity, and poor operational costs for core infrastructure providers.
The ERC-4337 standard was launched through a surprise March 1 announcement at WalletCon in Denver. At the time, many were optimistic that “smart accounts” would witness rapid adoption as the tech allows users to bypass the use of seed phrases and signing for certain transactions and would generally increase the user experience on Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchains.
Using figures from account abstraction data platform BundleBear, Rising claimed monthly account retention had been “terrible,” with just 6.89% of all the initial smart accounts having stuck around for more than six months.
Rising also highlighted that bundlers — core infrastructure components that allow smart accounts to function on EVM-compatible chains — were largely unprofitable despite some projects accidentally paying “too much” in gas to the bundlers. Additionally, the average smart account was found to have only sent five user operations — the execution of transactions or activities from the account.
However, Coinbase protocols lead and Base creator Jesse Pollak pushed back on Rising’s description of the numbers as “sobering” — claiming instead that the adoption of the new technology would happen “slowly, then suddenly.”
Dune analytics data showed August was the largest month for active account abstraction wallets, with over 420,000 active smart accounts across seven blockchains. Active smart accounts have been on a somewhat steady decline with 143,000 monthly active accounts recorded in October.
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