Ethereum, Base drop joint push to unify account abstraction proposals
Tech & Launches ·
Developers on Ethereum and Base have stopped efforts to reconcile two competing account abstraction standards after failing to agree on shared tradeoffs.
The two proposals at issue are EIP-8141 and EIP-8130, both aimed at advancing account abstraction but built around different priorities. According to The Block, teams working on Ethereum and Base had been attempting to align the two specifications but have now ended that coordination, citing conflicting views on security, scalability and compliance requirements.
Account abstraction is intended to let wallets behave as programmable smart accounts rather than being limited to the rigid, key-based structure of externally owned accounts. Because EIP-8141 and EIP-8130 approach that goal from different angles, reconciling them into a single standard would have required compromises that the two development groups were not able to settle on, with Ethereum-side priorities on protocol security and compliance sitting at odds with Base-side emphasis on scale.
The split has been corroborated separately, with reporting from wublockchain.xyz also describing the breakdown in coordination between the two camps. Multiple accounts in circulation frame the outcome the same way: rather than converging on one account abstraction path, Ethereum layer-1 development and Base appear set to pursue separate standards suited to their own constraints.
The wider account abstraction landscape has been active on multiple fronts, including EIP-8130 efforts led by Base, Optimism, Coinbase and WalletConnect around native account abstraction, and EIP-8141 work on simplifying transaction primitives. Those parallel tracks illustrate why alignment was being attempted in the first place, and why divergence carries practical weight for wallets and applications built across both environments.
What remains unclear is how deep the technical divergence between EIP-8141 and EIP-8130 will run in practice, and whether wallets, wallet providers, or infrastructure like WalletConnect will need to support both standards separately going forward. Also unresolved is whether the compliance concerns cited on the Ethereum side and the scaling priorities cited on the Base side will be revisited later, or whether the two ecosystems are now settling into permanently separate account abstraction paths.