This is one of the news of the last few days. After months of adjustments, Ethereum teams have managed to adopt a new standard on the blockchain. Its name: ERC 4337.

As soon as the announcement was made, comments and articles of praise poured in from all sides. For some, it's a "massive change", for others a "turning point", some have even spoken of a "revolution"! But is it really the case? We talked about it with several experts.

But first, what are we talking about?

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Ethereum is one of the main protocols of the Web3 ecosystem. Every day, thousands of developers work on its improvement to make it faster, more accessible, more innovative, more secure, less expensive...

These improvements include the development of new standards. One of the best known is the ERC 721 standard. Presented in 2017, it opened the way, on Ethereum, to non-fungible tokens, the famous NFTs (non-fungible tokens).

Facilitate wallet management

ERC 4337, on the other hand, is about something completely different. Its objective, as explained by the team of developers who presented it in early March, is to "facilitate the creation and management" of a digital portfolio. But how? That's the question.

Contrary to what has been said and written, the ERC 4337 will not allow you to do without your seed phrase (12 or 24 words to recover your account in case you lose your private key) or to program your wallet operations. And for good reason, "it's already been possible to do this for years with smart wallets," says Nicolas Bacca, co-founder and head of innovation at Ledger, who cites existing solutions like Argent.

On the other hand, these smart wallets have a big disadvantage since they have "proprietary" technologies. In other words, when you use one wallet, it is not compatible with the others.

"The advantage of the ERC 4337 is that it will standardize all this and allow smart wallets to be interoperable," says Nicolas Bacca. "Today it's just a promise, we'll have to see if it works in practice," he adds.

Is there anything new with the ERC 4337?

Yes, there are some small additions beyond the standardization of smart wallets. The ERC 4337 allows the implementation of two-factor authentication (2FA) solutions that are widely used in the Web2 world (facial recognition), especially by banks. It will also allow to "sponsor" transactions in a wallet, i.e. it is possible to pay the transaction fees for a third party, especially for a user.

"One of the big problems right now is that if you don't have crypto in your wallet, you can't do anything. When you're used to using a wallet, it's not a problem, but for new users, it's a real headache: you have to go and buy cryptos yourself just to pay the fees for your first transaction," explains Frédéric Montagnon*, co-founder of Arianee, a company that supports brands in their NFTs projects.

An asset for companies

The arrival of ERC 4337 will democratize the use of wallets, confirms Jérôme de Tychey, president of Ethereum France and founder of Cometh, a crypto gaming company that helps companies in the world of NFTs. "This standard will clearly help companies launch crypto projects because they will be able to more easily support their customers in getting to grips with the wallets. This is a big obstacle for them today," he explains.

In a sign that ERC 4337 could change things, competing ecosystems have understood that a comparable solution should be offered quickly. "This standardization and the interoperability it offers will make Ethereum even more attractive," acknowledges Clément Téqui, CEO of Capsule Corp Labs and co-founder of the Ternoa blockchain, which is based on the Polkadot ecosystem.

* Frédéric Montagnon is an individual shareholder of The Big Whale.