Glossary
Account Abstraction
Treating accounts as smart contracts with custom validation logic — signatures, gas payment, recovery — instead of being a single ECDSA keypair.
Externally-owned accounts (EOAs) are the same on every EVM chain: one ECDSA key, one nonce, gas paid in the native token. Account abstraction lets your wallet be a smart contract instead: pay gas in USDC, use a passkey or biometric instead of a seed phrase, recover with social signers, batch multiple actions into one transaction.
On Ethereum, ERC-4337 enables AA without protocol changes. Native AA — having the protocol itself treat all accounts as contracts (EIP-7702, zkSync's design) — is the next step.