What is EIP-3074 and what does it mean for Account Abstraction ?

EIP-3074 was recently proposed by Ethereum Core Developers for inclusion in Q4 2024/early 2025 and has sparked a lot of discussion regarding the relevance of this 2020 proposal today. Let’s explore what this EIP entails and how it fits into the current Account Abstraction landscape.

EOAs vs. smart wallets

EOAs (Externally Owned Accounts) are the foundational accounts on any blockchain, consisting of a pair of private/public keys (and a public address) to identify and sign transactions.

Smart wallets are accounts represented by a smart contract (and their public address) and are controlled by external signers. They are implementations of Account Abstraction, an architecture akin to the separation between your bank account and the credit cards using it – the wallet is your bank account; the external signers are the credit cards.

Smart wallets offer many benefits, especially for onboarding new users:

• Sponsored Transactions: Gas can be paid externally, allowing the user to interact without holding cryptocurrencies .
• Batch Transactions: Users can sign once for multiple transactions .
• Accounts can have spending rules like multi-signatures.
• Wallets can be accessed in ways other than native EOAs, such as through passkeys.

Despite these benefits and a growing Account Abstraction ecosystem, EOAs still dominate the wallet landscape.

EIP-3074: Bringing sponsored transactions and batching to EOAs

The goal of EIP-3074 is to introduce some advantages of smart wallets to EOAs, such as sponsored transactions and batching. The concept involves users delegating control of their wallets to invokers through two opcodes (low-level instructions in the Ethereum Virtual Machine), which raises concerns about security and loss of user control. Nonetheless, it could be a significant improvement for the existing millions of EOAs, but it raises two questions:

• Is it necessary/required for onboarding new users?
• What about other benefits of smart accounts?

Onboarding new users to web3

For new users, EIP-3074 offers no advantages over Account Abstraction, as both support sponsored transactions and batching. Moreover, existing implementations of Account Abstraction (like EIP-4337) are already operational, supporting these features and more.

EIP-5003: Bridging the gap between EIP-3074 “augmented EOAs” and real Smart Accounts

The issue with EIP-3074 is that control over EOAs is only delegated and can be revoked, which hinders the use of other smart account features like:

• Multisig: EIP-3074 wallets are still owned by individual EOAs,
• Recovery: Recovery often uses the multi-signer/multi-owner feature of smart accounts. That’s why EIP-5003 was introduced—to enable accounts to “escape” EIP-3074 and convert to real smart accounts.

(From Safe founder’s view)

What about now?

At Cometh, we are convinced that full Account Abstraction through EIP-3074 AND EIP-5003 is a beneficial way to enhance the user experience on web3 in the future. 

Cometh Connect is available now, as a fully integrated Account Abstraction wallet solution on any EVM:

• Based on the most secure technologies available now (passkeys, and Safe smart accounts),
• Simple to use (a single biometric authentication to create a smart wallet or sign a transaction),
• Easy to integrate in just a few minutes into any tech stack.

▶️ Try the demo