Smart Wallets Face Two-Format Future After Ethereum-Base Split

Ethereum news rarely comes with a breakup, but this one does. Ethereum and Base have dropped plans for a shared account-abstraction standard, and each will now go its own way. That’s according to Derek Chiang, an Ethlabs developer who co-authored one of the two proposals. He also founded ZeroDev, a wallet-infrastructure firm. Ethereum is moving ahead with EIP-8141, known as Frame Transactions while Base is pursuing EIP-8130, a Keystore-based design. Talks between the two sides ended the week before Chiang’s post. This is more than a dispute over implementation details. It’s a fork between the two most-watched networks in the Ethereum ecosystem. At stake is how each will make account abstraction native to the base layer. Account abstraction builds smart-wallet logic directly into how transactions are validated. Done natively, it would let users pay network fees without holding ETH and they could sign with a phone passkey and rotate keys without add-on infrastructure. Chiang argues that wallet software can still hide the difference from end users. That claim will be tested as development continues. It’s worth watching alongside broader Ethereum network activity data. Ethereum and Bas...