Ethereum Pectra upgrade promises major wallet improvements with EIP 3074 integration

Ethereum developers are currently deliberating the Pectra upgrade, which is poised to enhance various facets of the blockchain’s functionality.

Tim Beiko, the Ethereum Foundation‘s protocol support lead, confirmed the development, revealing that the developers have agreed to include Ethereum Improvement Proposals (EIP) 3074 in the network’s slated overhaul.

EIP 3074

EIP 3074 is a pivotal advancement within Ethereum’s ecosystem and was introduced by Lightclients in 2020. The proposal has garnered widespread support from the crypto community as it aims to enhance the user experience (UX) of Ethereum wallets.

Fundamentally, EIP 3074 enables conventional crypto wallets like MetaMask to function akin to smart contracts.

This upgrade facilitates various functionalities, including transaction bundling, streamlining the signing process to a single step, and sponsored transactions. The latter feature empowers wallets to delegate funds for others to utilize, offering a more versatile and efficient transaction framework.

Trading a new token on a DEX such as Uniswap will now only require one signature from a user’s wallet as opposed to having to approve the new token and then sign the transaction to purchase.

Crypto community reacts

The announcement of the impending upgrade has sparked various reactions within the crypto community.

Georgios Konstantopoulous, Paradigm’s CTO, highlighted the update’s potential to enhance wallet usability tenfold, noting Reth’s successful implementation and testing.

Echoing this sentiment, Hayden Adams, the mind behind Uniswap, lauded the upgrade as a significant boost to Ethereum’s user experience. He added:

“Industry should make an effort to create compatibility for 4337 wallets to interact with 3074 contracts (much like eip1271 has created compatibility between safes and EOAs today).”

However, EVM developer Alex Watts cautioned against solely focusing on user experience improvements, emphasizing the broader implications for application and mechanism design.

Despite the optimism, concerns linger among some community members regarding the EIP 3074 upgrade.

Ansgar Dietrich, an Ethereum Researcher involved in the proposal’s inception, expressed ambivalence, reflecting on the lengthy journey to its impending mainnet integration and questioning its alignment with the evolving account abstraction roadmap.

Similarly, 0xngmi, the pseudonymous developer of DeFiLlama, raised apprehensions about the upgrade potentially enabling the complete depletion of addresses, encompassing tokens, NFTs, and other DeFi assets.