4 Months After EIP-7702: Does Your Wallet Feel Smarter? Ivo Georgiev, Ambire | ETHSofia 2025

Transcript

[Music] So I'm Evo from Umpire Wallet and um my crypto journey started a long time ago. Um my background is technical. So uh I started uh programming in high school. Uh then in uh 2011 I got into Bitcoin. I was still in high school. So back then I was mining on my CPU. Um I found a blog and then promptly spent all the bitcoin. Uh that's a bit regrettable. But uh then in 2013 right after high school I started my first uh startup stream uh which is a media center and it took a few years to get to get off the ground

but once it took off it took off fast. So today it has over 50 million users. Uh and this really shaped my background as like a consumer focused founder. So then in 2017 uh me and my co-founder started Addex Network uh which was one of the first projects um on Ethereum in Bulgaria and I think pretty much in the world. Uh and then in 2019 Addex Network started working on a smart wallet since we realized that it's really hard to onboard uh like normal people onto Ethereum. Uh and so we um we basically built this smart wallet which I'm going to talk to you about uh a bit later. But um we spun this off into Umpire in 2021

and uh then with Umpire we launched an initial version which was a web wallet and then we pivoted to a browser extension uh and we launched this browser extension this year and now we're running at over uh 10,000 uh active users uh which is pretty fantastic for the Ethereum ecosystem. Uh and uh yeah that's a brief introduction about me and uh the slides are going to be here I think in a minute. So first of all um when talking about wallets we need to focus on what does web 3 stand for and what makes it different uh from web two and um the first thing that's really important is self- custody. So that's something that you don't get in web two. The second thing is

composability. So that's pretty unique about web3 because uh you can go on openc and you can buy an NFT and then this NFT is attached to your account. So then you can go in a different dub and use the same asset to like get a loan for example. Uh one day NFTs will be um available as collateral in a let's say. So, you will be able to get a loan of your NFT and that has really powerful uh really big power to change the world because like one day you can have your house as an NFT and you can get a loan from a rather than the bank and everyone who's gotten a mortgage knows how hard it is and how much paperwork there is.

Maybe it's not difficult per se, but there's a lot of paperwork and we have the potential to change that and make it like one click. Uh and there's no other industry that does that. Um what he means specifically is that you cannot go on interactive brokers uh buy an Apple stock and then use this Apple stock as collateral on a different application. Uh it's held in interactive brokers. So you cannot like compose between different applications and that's unique about web 3. Uh and then finally we have autonomy which is like the ability to delegate control to an AI agent of your wallet securely. So that's again something unique because you can put in the onchain guards to make sure that your wallet doesn't get drained and that the AI agent doesn't do anything stupid because uh you're all familiar with and

you know how much they hallucinate sometimes. So giving them full control over your wallet is not a good idea but if you have these onchain safe uh safeguards that's fantastic. Um, so yeah, that's all well and good, but uh we have a bit of a problem with this. And the problem is that um Web3 UX right now really sucks. So what I mean by that, you all know how seed phrases are. Um and u basically the concept of writing down 12 words uh is pretty uh is pretty alien to anyone else. And um if you're coming from web two uh the fact that you cannot reset your seat phrase and the fact that if you forget it you lose it forever uh that's really

painful. So uh people don't realize that seat phrases are not an access key but they are practically equal to your money. Um and yeah another thing that's really absurd is fishing. So sometimes you would see this hash and MetaMask would ask you do you want to sign this hash and if you click yes your money will be gone. uh which is quite frankly. Uh and uh the thing is you don't realize what you've just signed. Uh so yeah uh UX is not great. And we also have uh of course the problem with transaction fees. So sometimes you try to do something with your wallet and it says that you don't have enough for gas.

Like what does that mean? So gas is for cars, right? Um so yeah and this problem is especially big if you use multiple layer tools. So like if you use bass or optimism or arbitrum and uh you have ether on ethereum but you don't have anything on base or arbitum right so that's really painful let's see if uh the slides are working yes so uh from here on out my talk is going to include some bold statements and this is due to the fact that we cannot condense all of these technical information about why UX sucks so much uh into such a short talk and uh basically I need to legitimize myself for what I'm link um and we can nerd out later. We can discuss the

technical details of all this on Twitter um or you can ping me in any other way. Uh but yeah, I need to legitimize myself and I've already done that. Uh but it's worth noting that me and my team, we are one of the pioneers of smart account wallets. Um and uh basically account obstruction started getting hot. Uh account obstruction equals smart accounts by the way. So it started getting hot in 2023 and we were working on this since 2019. So huge amount of time. So uh yeah, how to fix web3 user experience. So basically as I said smart accounts that I've been mentioning already uh equals account obstruction. And what this is is the ability to uh include program code

as part of the account. So basically your account uh wouldn't be um a private key but it would be some code. And Ethereum was meant to launch in this but with this but it was scrubbed in 2016 just before the launch of the Ethereum mainet. And this decision was then kind of regretted even though account obstruction is super hard to get right. So uh since then we've had a ton of research and it's still not launched natively on Ethereum but yeah and um yeah to reiterate what account obstruction is or what smart accounts are. Um you can look at those pictures and don't be afraid. It's not scary at all. It's really really simple. So uh the simple part is that current accounts on crypto doesn't matter if it's Solana,

Bitcoin, Ethereum, they're just a very large number, extremely large, impossible to guess number. And the problem with this number is that the only human friendly way, it's not even human friendly to store such a number is the seed phrase. Uh and that's really hard to uh really hard to uh keep safe. It's easy to lose and anyone takes a picture of it, they have access to your funds. So yeah large number is not good for humans. Uh but what is great for humans is some kind of logic that we can program into the accounts and this is where smart accounts come in. So smart accounts are just some code that represents your account and in that way we can build multiple things like we can build account recovery like when you

lose access to your hardware wallet or you lose uh your device uh there would be an an additional way to recover access to your account. Uh so then another thing would be easier onboarding. So rather than having to write down the words and then confirm that you know the words you can just use your phone uh which already has pass keys and those pass keys live on a secure enclave in the phone. So the phone is already a better crypto wallet than treasure or ledger believe it or not uh because the secure enclave in your uh phone is much better researched than those hardware wallets. Yes, crypto is big. Yes, it's securing like billions and trillions of market cap. uh but you cannot argue that the secure enclave in Apple devices uh is used to secure like

much much higher value overall. So it's much better researched and um smart accounts also allow you to do scam prevention which is quite nice. So scam prevention comes in two way in two different aspects. One of the aspects is no infinite ERC20 approvals. Uh so everyone who has used unis swap or who has used an ethereum wallet knows that sometimes you will be asked for this infinite approval and that kind of feels scary because it is right when you give an infinite approval to a specific app if this app ever gets compromised and if its account is uh if it's smart contract is upgradeable you can get drained for a lot of money and many people have fallen victim to this. Um and another thing that smart accounts let us do is transaction simulation. So this is the

thing where before you sign a transaction, you see the entire outcome of the transaction which is quite nice. It's kind of similar to electronic banking but not really because we can simulate like all of the outcomes of a specific transaction. And finally, you never worry about fees about transaction fees because you can pay transaction fees crosschain and you can prepay for fees. So like if you have a single account, uh it doesn't matter which layer two you go on, you'll always be able to pay for uh transactions. So uh this is all well and good and it has existed for a long long time but why isn't it adopted? Why is nobody using it? Well um 10,000 people are using it with umpire. Uh but why isn't everyone using it yet? So uh we launched as I

said the first version a long time ago in 2021 and even though we rose very quickly to over 100,000 users uh we uh really encountered one very big setback which was that people um have existing accounts and they don't want to migrate. So uh this means that they would continue using their existing accounts and for you to use a smart account you have to move to a different account as the name implies and this is painful because you have money on a you have locked up funds you have staked funds etc etc etc. So yeah, really big setback. But um there is a solution to this. Uh even though there's like a tons of um of EIPs about account abstraction, uh we often have this issue where uh a

new EIP comes up like a year 4337. Everyone thinks it will solve everything but then it flops. It doesn't solve anything. So why is this? Uh is because for us as a community to care about an EAP, it gets over marketed. So it it promises to solve everything, but in reality it's merely a technical step towards the goal. Uh and all of the EAPs that exist in the Ethereum ecosystem, they're almost never competing. Even though in the media, they're portrayed like they're competing between each other. Uh but we have one that is different uh which is uh EIP702.

Uh and this one it was overhyped. It's still a small technical step towards a goal. uh but it's very different in that it allows you to have smart account features on your existing account. So you can have an account since 2017 or whatever uh but you will be able to use all these features that I just pitched on your existing account. So this changes everything both for us and for the entire industry and uh what this allows to eliminate your C20 approvals to ensure that there is account recovery um to ensure easier onboarding and to also allow transaction batching. So this saves gas but it also makes user flows much simpler. So where are we today in terms of uh ERC uh 7702 adoption. Uh so

those are some statistics and AMIR is leading um between all of the known implementations but also we have over a million total authorizations. Here are some further statistics and this is very significant because we have only 10 million active users on Ethereum altogether. So from those 10 million a lot of them are bots and a lot of them are some other automated accounts or even exchange deposit addresses like maybe 40% are exchange deposit addresses. So we have like a huge chunk of the current um wallet landscape already migrated to uh 7702.

So uh one more thing that I want to say about 772 because whoever is familiar might know that might have you might have heard that it's used for fishing. It's used for scams. It can compromise your wallet. This is all It's all lies. So uh the reality is that there is no way for someone to fish you using ERC7702 uh EAP702. Uh there is no protocol uh for ADAP to request you to delegate a malicious contract. There's no communication mechanism to do this. The only way for an account to be appointed a 7702 delegator is through your actual wallet implementation. So if buyer doesn't allow it, uh this not possible.

So umpire doesn't allow it. MetaMask doesn't allow it, Rabby doesn't allow it. So there's no way for your wallet to get compromised with 7702. The wallet says the implementation and that's pretty much it. And yeah, there are a lot of uh accounts which have malicious delegations on them. But those are accounts which already um have their private key leaked. So in this case, hackers use 7702 to like com to like drain the accounts in an easier way if funds ever go to them. And this is completely irrelevant, right? Because the private key is already leaked. Everyone can do whatever they want with your account regardless. Um, so yeah, this was supposed to be a quick demo, a quick video demo. Um, we do have some technical difficulties, so you're going to have to imagine it. Uh but basically

this is done by a user interface and uh a user in this case me I click on a token I swap it in one click and the cool thing is yeah there's wallets allowing this like rabian meta mask but in umpire it's also crosschain first of all so you can go from any chain to any other chain in just one click uh and then second of all there's no approvals uh so there's no uh ERC20 approvals that you have to worry about and if you use a hardware wallet it's only one signature and it's not two signatures and this is also more secure in the long run. So um what is the future?

So first of all, let's say that cliches are cliches for a reason and that a great example of this was that Facebook initially was used just by college students and not only college students, technical college college students, right? So a really niche community just like Ethereum but today we associate Facebook with boomers. We associate Facebook with your mother, with your grandma. Um and with this I would like to get off the stage. Heat [Applause] up [Music] [Music]