Ethereum and Base split on account-abstraction standard

Developers working on Ethereum’s EIP-8141, known as Frame Transactions, and Coinbase-backed Base’s EIP-8130 were unable to agree on a common account-abstraction standard, Ethlabs reported on Sept. 14. The teams tried to reconcile their proposals but could not bridge differing technical priorities.

Ethereum is moving forward with EIP-8141, a proposal that breaks a transaction into programmable calls that separately handle validation, execution and gas payment. The design detaches account behavior from today’s elliptic-curve keys, aims to allow key rotation and opens a path for post-quantum authentication by letting accounts act according to code rather than fixed key formats.

Base’s proposal, EIP-8130 and authored by Coinbase engineer Chris Hunter, takes a more structured approach. It requires transactions to identify an authenticator up front so nodes can determine validation work and potentially reject unknown authenticators before executing wallet code. The draft describes two adoption profiles: one for L1 that permits authenticators outside a canonical set within limits, and one for L2s that lets high-throughput chains restrict native transactions to approved authenticators.

Ethlabs researcher Derek Chiang summarized the split between the projects: “Ethereum wanted to be the best version of Ethereum, and Base wanted to be the best version of Base.” The teams continued discussions in August even after Ethereum core developers gave EIP-8141 a strong signal toward inclusion in the Hegotá upgrade.

The disagreement centers on how much freedom accounts should have versus how much structure chains should impose on transactions before execution. EIP-8141 emphasizes flexible, account-defined behavior. EIP-8130 emphasizes predictable validation and node-level control over which authenticators run natively.

The proposals both aim to make wallets more programmable and to support features such as sponsored gas payments and passkeys. EIP-8130 retains mechanisms intended to preserve account portability: it proposes a common authenticator set and preserves ERC-4337 as an alternative transport for networks that do not support the 8130 transaction type.

Ethereum core developer Matt Garnett wrote that divergence among layer-2 networks is likely because market pressure pushes them to ship features faster than the L1. “Market pressure forces them to ship features at a pace that L1 cannot match, so incompatibilities accumulate. Time will tell whether that is a strength or weakness,” Garnett wrote.

Crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro noted the split could complicate arguments that layer-2 growth automatically strengthens Ethereum. He wrote: “L2s are great — for the crypto industry and for people who own the sequencer. For Ethereum, they are just kinda like ‘less bad’ than competing L1s.” Shapiro highlighted concerns about where product control and economic value concentrate as L2s attract users and applications.

With the proposals diverging, wallet developers and tooling teams may need to support multiple native transaction formats or rely on off-protocol transports such as ERC-4337. The technical choices remain under development as Ethereum and various L2s continue to update their specifications.