61 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
61 lines
2.9 KiB
Markdown
Ethereum Account Abstraction
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============================
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A high level overview of what the current state of account abstraction in
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Ethereum is and what role it might play in the Codex design.
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TL;DR: Account abstraction does not impact the design of Codex
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Current state
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-------------
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There have been several proposals to introduce [account abstraction][roadmap]
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for Ethereum. Most of them required changes to the consensus mechanism, and were
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therefore postponed and have not made it into mainnet. [ERC-4337][4337] is a
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newer proposal that uses smart contracts and does not require changes to the
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consensus mechanism. It uses a separate mempool for transaction-like objects
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called "user operations". They are picked up by bundlers who bundle them into an
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actual transaction that is executed on-chain. ERC-4337 is the closest to being
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usable on mainnet.
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An ERC-4337 entry point [contract][entrypoint] is deployed on mainnet since
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March 2023. One bundler seems to be active ([Stackup][stackup]), although at the
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time of writing it seems to be running neither regularly nor without errors.
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Codex use cases
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---------------
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Potential Codex use cases for account abstraction are:
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- Paying for storage without requiring ETH to pay for gas
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- Checking for missing storage proofs
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Clients pay for storage and hosts put down collateral in the Codex marketplace.
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They need both ERC-20 tokens for payment and collateral and ETH for gas. We
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expect wallet providers to make full use of ERC-4337 to implement transactions
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where gas is paid for by ERC-20 tokens instead of ETH. These wallets can then be
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used to interact with the Codex marketplace. This does not require a change to
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the design of Codex itself.
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In our current design for the Codex marketplace we require hosts to provide
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[storage proofs][proofs] at unpredictable times. If they fail to provide a
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proof, then a simple [validator][validator] can mark a proof as missing. Even
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though the marketplace smart contract has all the logic to determine whether a
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proof is actually missing, we need the validator to initiate a transaction to
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execute the logic.
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Some of the write-ups on account abstraction seem to indicate that account
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abstraction would allow for contracts to initiate transactions, or for
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subscriptions and repeat payments. However, I could not find any indications in
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the specifications that this would be the case. Certainly ERC-4337 does not
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allow for this. This means that account abstraction as it currently stands
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cannot be used to replace the validator when checking for missing storage
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proofs.
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[roadmap]: https://ethereum.org/en/roadmap/account-abstraction/
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[4337]: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4337
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[entrypoint]: https://etherscan.io/address/0x5FF137D4b0FDCD49DcA30c7CF57E578a026d2789
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[stackup]: https://www.stackup.sh/
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[proofs]: https://github.com/codex-storage/codex-research/blob/33cd86af4d809c39c7c41ca50a6922e6b5963c67/design/storage-proof-timing.md
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[validator]: https://github.com/codex-storage/nim-codex/pull/387
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