Poor Adoption Of ERC-4337 Smart Accounts Raises Concern

• New figures show hardly anyone is using ERC-4337 smart accounts

John Rising, an advocate for Ethereum account abstraction, has published some “sobering” statistics indicating that overall ERC-4437 adoption has been far from optimal. 

Rising presented data points showing a reduction in users, low transaction activity, and poor operational expenses for core infrastructure providers in a Nov. 14 post on X (previously Twitter).

Retention is terrible.

The one exception to this is CyberConnect, who had a lot of users return to claim an airdrop.

Data: @0xBundleBear pic.twitter.com/TUzQQJYcp8

— John Rising (@johnrising_) November 13, 2023

The ERC-4337 standard was announced unexpectedly on March 1 at WalletCon in Denver. Many were optimistic at the time that “smart accounts” would find significant acceptance because the technology allows users to avoid using seed phrases and signing for specific transactions and would generally improve the user experience on Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchains.

Using statistics from account abstraction data provider BundleBear, Rising stated that monthly account retention was “terrible,” with only 6.89% of all original smart accounts remaining for more than six months.

Some sobering ERC-4337 data 👇

— John Rising (@johnrising_) November 13, 2023

Rising also stated that bundlers — fundamental infrastructure components that enable smart accounts to operate on EVM-compatible chains — were mainly unprofitable, despite the fact that certain projects paid “too much” in gas to the bundlers.

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Furthermore, it was discovered that the average smart account only sent five user operations — the execution of transactions or activities from the account.

However, Coinbase protocols head and Base founder Jesse Pollak disputed Rising’s description of the numbers as “sobering,” arguing that the new technology would be used “slowly, then suddenly.”

“Just seems very early. Growth seems to be healthy, standardization seems to be happening,” Pollak said. “More and more teams I’m talking to are making the jump.”

Some sobering ERC-4337 data 👇

— John Rising (@johnrising_) November 13, 2023

According to Dune analytics, August was the most active month for active account abstraction wallets, with over 420,000 active smart accounts across seven blockchains.

The number of smart accounts that are active on a monthly basis. Dune Analytics is the source.

With 143,000 monthly active accounts recorded in October, active smart accounts have been on a slightly steady decline.