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Ethereum Co-Founder Highlights User-Friendly Crypto Wallets at Ethcon Korea 2023

Web3 & Enterprise·September 04, 2023, 9:20 AM

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivered a keynote speech last Friday at Ethcon Korea 2023 — a hackathon and conference sponsored by Ethereum for the Korean Ethereum community in Seongsu-dong, Seoul — where he emphasized the importance of making crypto wallets user-friendly by striking a balance between user familiarity and decentralization.

Photo by Nenad Novaković on Unsplash

 

Enhancing security and convenience

Participating in the event via video call, Buterin explained Ethereum’s ERC-4337 account abstraction upgrade during his speech, which was livestreamed on the Ethcon Korea YouTube channel. “The goal of account abstraction — a field that many wallets are currently working on developing — can be broadly categorized into two areas: security and convenience,” he said.

Deployed on the Ethereum mainnet in March, the ERC-4337 is a standard that makes it possible to transact and create contracts in a single contract account, paving the way for more user-friendly crypto wallet designs. At its core are features such as easy account recovery, improved security, and customized services like auto-pay and bundled transactions. This provides a more convenient alternative to other crypto wallets, which mostly rely on private keys for account access, complicating setup and recovery procedures especially if a user loses their seed phrase.

“Wallets must fundamentally be secure in a decentralized way, but there should also be ways to recover passwords as hardware wallets do,” Buterin stated. “However, many projects still rely on methods such as account recovery via email.”

 

Simplifying transactions

Another change introduced through the update is gas flexibility. Gas is a fundamental fee that users must pay to conduct transactions or execute a contract on Ethereum. Wallets backed by ERC-4337 can pay gas fees with any Ethereum utility tokens and more, including USD coins (USDC).

From a convenience standpoint, Vitalik argued, it is very useful for first-time Ethereum users to be able to pay for gas with the USDC they already have. Sponsored transactions, where applications pay for fees, will be a great way to attract new users, especially for non-financial applications.

He further elaborated that in order to transition from being user-friendly but centralized to more decentralized, a combination of a faster but precarious centralized approach with a slower but safer decentralized approach is required.

He also stressed the importance of utilizing the various options available in modern technology concerning convenience, security, and decentralization, saying that it is essential to utilize these options effectively, continuously improve them, and take advantage of the benefits.

Since 2019, Buterin has used Ethcon as a platform to announce Ethereum’s development roadmap and major technical updates.

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