Ethereum’s next hard fork could make lost private keys a thing of the past.

Ethereum users may no longer need to worry about losing their pedigrees after the Pectra hard fork – due to the new “social recovery” feature proposed in EIP-3074.

The Ethereum update proposal, EIP-3074, as a new addition to the Pectra hard fork, was confirmed by Ethereum Core Developer Tim Beiko in an April 11 X post.

The update will see many new smart contracts with a number of new smart contract capabilities “overpayment,” Ethereum Foundation researcher “Domothy” explained in a March 25 blog post.

However, in order to use the social recovery tool, users must first transfer ownership of their assets to a requester contract with a digital signature, which will make future transactions and calls on the user's behalf.

When delegating ownership, the message in the digital signature allows the user to retrieve their property if they lose or forget their seed phrase.

The feature is made possible by the implementation of the “AUTH” and “AUTHCALL” opcodes, cryptocurrency analyst Saigar explained in the April 11 X post.

AUTH takes the user's signature and intended action and verifies that it is properly signed. AUHCALL then calls the target contract to perform the transaction, but assigns the user as the caller instead of the caller contract.

Domoti, however, shared concerns that funds could be depleted if users submit their assets to malicious requester contracts, although he also expects that fewer formally verified and fully audited referral contracts will be available after the Pectra update.

It is estimated that billions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency have been lost due to users forgetting or losing their private keys.

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Meanwhile, another key benefit of EIP-3074 is that users don't need any Ether (ETH) in their wallets to send transactions, as the party behind the notifying contract can pay for that priority.

“This could be huge for mass retail adoption,” Cigar said.

It also allows you to take multiple actions in one transaction.

“Now to exchange tokens on Uniswap, you must first approve Uniswap to use your tokens and then run the actual swap. not good”

“[But] In 3074, these two actions can be assigned in one tx,” Saigar added.

The Pectra hard fork is said to happen in late 2024 or early 2025.

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