A collaboration to align Base's and Ethereum's approaches to account abstraction has collapsed, according to Ethlabs founder Derek Chiang, who also runs ZeroDev. The effort to reconcile two competing draft proposals ended last week, leaving each side to pursue its own native smart-account standard.
Account abstraction lets smart-contract accounts set their own validation rules instead of relying on the fixed rules used by regular wallets. The current standard, ERC-4337, works without changing Ethereum's core protocol by routing user operations through a separate mempool and a bundler system. Both new proposals move that functionality into native transaction handling, but they take structurally different paths.
EIP-8130 combines a new typed transaction with an onchain keystore and account-configuration system. Each transaction declares its authenticator upfront, so nodes can reject unknown validation methods before executing any wallet code. The draft defines a mainnet profile that accepts permissive authenticators and a layer-2 profile restricted to a canonical authenticator set, giving high-throughput chains more predictable validation costs.
EIP-8141 takes the opposite approach, breaking each transaction into a sequence of "frames" that validate the transaction, approve gas, and execute operations. Accounts can use EVM code to define those rules, supporting key rotation and alternative fee payments.
Ethlabs, which backs Frame Transactions for the upcoming Hegotá hard fork, argues this permissionless design offers more flexibility for privacy and future signature systems.
The central tradeoff is that dynamic validation under EIP-8141 can create cost unpredictability for high-throughput layer-2 networks, while EIP-8130's explicit authenticator model trades flexibility for consistency. Chiang characterized the failed merger effort as "putting the burden on wallets to deal with the fragmentation that ensues," though he noted software could still hide those differences from end users.
Without a shared native transaction format, wallets and applications would need to handle each chain's validation rules independently. EIP-8130's draft still allows accounts to function on other EVM chains through ERC-4337 or alternative transport, so the proposals are not mutually exclusive in practice. But the unified vision of one native format across Ethereum and Base is dead for now.
Chiang outlined two possible paths forward. Either Ethereum and its layer-2s coordinate more tightly on shared resources, or the ecosystem accepts the protocol differences and builds wallets that abstract them away from users. For now, the official registry keeps both designs listed as drafts, and neither has advanced past that stage.
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