Smart Accounts & Account Abstraction

This section details how smart accounts & AA is used to simplify UX on ZeroLend One

A Smart account is a smart contract wallet that follows the ERC-4337 specification.

Ethereum has two types of accounts for transferring and receiving tokens: EOAs (Externally Owned Accounts) and Contract Accounts. A smart account is a wallet managed by a contract account instead of an EOA. It is a wallet type requiring no private keys or seed phrases. Smart accounts rely on code instead of private keys to secure and recover wallet information.

A smart account is a type of Web3 wallet powered by smart contracts.

This smart account is unlocked by a 'key' - a personal account. This key can be anything from a MetaMask wallet or even an In-App Wallet and is used as a way to 'sign in' to the wallet.

Features of Smart Accounts

Smart accounts introduce a whole host of features that allow users to have a much simpler experience on the chain.

  1. Wallet recovery: Unlike EOAs, a smart account’s security does not rely on a seed phrase or private key. A smart account owner can assign multiple devices, people, or third-party services as wallet guardians. In case they lose their credentials, the guardians can sign a transaction to assign new credentials to access the smart account.

  2. Batch transactions: Using smart accounts, we can batch multiple transactions together and approve all of them at once. For the first time, this can make DeFi transactions feel as simple as traditional finance transactions.

  3. Shared accounts and team wallets: Account abstraction lets you share different levels of access to your wallet with multiple users. So, say you can create a multi-signature where two or more users must sign a transaction to execute it. Further, you may add users who can only pay limited amounts to a specific set of wallets within specific durations.

  4. Automated transactions: In the case of smart accounts, you can define a range of parameters such as access to specific tokens, spend limits, duration, gas limit, specific actions based on pre-defined triggers, and much more.

  5. Sponsor gas fees of transactions of other users or use any token to pay gas: With the help of paymasters, users can sign transactions using other ERC20 tokens (such as USDC) as payment.

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