Debbie Chia, Safe & Anirudh Chohan
Today with the arrival of v1.4.1, Safe is excited to announce support for ERC-4337 integrations, increasing Safe{Core}’s account abstraction stack powers for developers. The in-demand feature enables developers to further leverage the benefits of account abstraction when building on Safe{Core}’s AA stack, while retaining flexibility and security at its core.
First-mover in Account Abstraction
Account abstraction is often mentioned as one of the most important upgrades to Ethereum and has been recently featured in Vitalik Buterin’s blog as part of Ethereum’s 3 critical transitions necessary for the global adoption of web3.
Safe has been a leader and first mover in account abstraction, with its modular smart accounts infrastructure already making the benefits of account abstraction possible for a long time. To date, there are over 3.6 Million Safe smart accounts across 12+ chains, executing more than 12 Million transactions.
The new ERC-4337 support to Safe{Core}’s account abstraction stack widens the scope for developers to build further ERC-4337 integrated use cases that abstract away the complexities keeping millions from entering web3.
What is ERC-4337
Deployed on the Ethereum mainnet in March 2023, ERC-4337 is an Ethereum standard that paves the way for account abstraction as a new way for transactions to be handled on the protocol.
Without needing consensus-layer protocol changes, the standard allows for a separate entrypoint for transactions. This entrypoint functions as a transaction relayer for smart accounts like Safes, offering an off-chain transaction pool for organising (or bundling transactions) together, before relaying them back to the Ethereum mainnet for execution.
Because ERC-4337 abstracts away the hardcoded logic of externally owned accounts (EOA), it is able to abstract away the complexities that have made EOA wallets so far hard to use; pain points such as: seed phrases, gas fees and account recovery.
In this regard, the ERC-4337 standard offers a simpler user experience, including capabilities such as seedless logins, social recovery, batched transactions, hybrid custody setups, and more. These promising capabilities of account abstraction have even led to experiments by the likes of payments giant Visa.
Building with flexibility and security at the core
Previously, developers building on Safe{Core} were able to build on the Relay Kit using technology from Gelato. With ERC-4337 integrations supported in v.1.4.1, developers now have further flexibility to choose the preferred relayer technologies that they want to build with, or to build their own relay modules.
The fully audited upgrade adheres to Safe’s strict standards of security while being modular and flexible at its core. Safe contracts v1.4.1 are currently deployed in Mainnet, Gnosis Chain, Polygon zkEVM Testnet and Mumbai networks.
At Safe, we build an account abstraction stack that enables the best user and developer experience but with an uncompromising high standard of security. ERC-4337 is an exciting addition to the Safe Smart Account toolkit and gives developers the flexibility to choose the relayer technologies they want to build with. We want to build the most modular, flexible, and unopinionated stack for account abstraction. ERC-4337, as it matures, will play a key part as a relaying option for developers to build products for millions of users. - Richard Meissner, Co-Founder and Technical lead at Safe
The Safe{Core} v1.4.1 update invites developers to build on ERC-4337 integrations and will be a key part of the upcoming hackathon at ETHGlobal Paris (21-23 July 2023) for Safe.
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