Improve Ethereum Pectra to make standard wallets ‘smarter’ and improve UX.

The Ethereum Pectra update, scheduled for late 2024 or early 2025, is bringing more functionality to crypto wallets and improving their user experience (UX).

Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3074 has been approved for inclusion in the next update, which will allow standard crypto wallets to function as smart contracts.

One of the functions of EIP-3074 is to provide standard External Owned Accounts (EOAs), standard wallets such as the MetaMask wallet, with smart contract capabilities.

This allows functions such as transaction wrapping, so users only have to sign in once, and sponsored transactions where wallet funds can be repurposed, similar to account abstraction introduced in ERC-4337.

Anonymous Defillama developer 0xngmi said in an April 11 X post that the EIP vulnerability “can now completely wipe out an address (all tokens, all NFTs, all DeFi slots…) with just one bad signature.”

Gaslight founder Harrison Leggio wrote on X that despite the security concerns surrounding the update, people will always find a way to lose their money.

“People are literally giving their private keys to trading bots,” he added.

Software engineer Lawrence Day wrote that EIP's “most obvious useful application” is sponsored transactions, which allow users to “store Ether in a wallet that doesn't contain ether” and sponsor the gas from the contract that controls the wallet. .

Other proposed functions of the EIP-3074 include a social retrieval feature that obviates the need for the usual 12- to 24-word seed phrase.

Anonymous Web3 consultant Cigar explained on X that EIP will transform wallets into smart contracts by adding two new operating instructions – AUTH and AUTHCALL.

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AUTH verifies signatures and actions. AUHCALL “calls the target contract(s) with the originator address” instead of the sender, Saigar wrote.

The proposed Pectra update lowers Layer-2 transaction fees after Ethereum developers were pushed back by Denkun's update last month.

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared the next steps for the “Purge” in early April, which will eliminate the old and redundant history of the network.

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