Ethereum and Base split on account abstraction after joint standard talks collapse

Efforts to agree on a shared account abstraction standard between Ethereum and Base collapsed last week, and wallets will now have to support two separate transaction formats.

Ethereum and Base are set to implement different account abstraction standards after efforts to agree on a shared standard broke down last week, a split that pushes the burden of cross-chain compatibility onto wallet developers and underscores a growing philosophical divide between layer-1 and layer-2 networks.

Derek Chiang, founding member and researcher at Ethlabs and a co-author of Ethereum’s EIP-8141 proposal, revealed the breakdown in a Monday post on X, saying interoperability standards became secondary to each chain’s core goals, leading both networks to go their separate ways and “putting the burden on wallets.” Account abstraction allows programmable rules for authorizing transactions and paying fees, the technology behind smart-contract wallets, gas sponsorship, session keys and social recovery.

The practical consequence: wallet developers who want to offer a consistent experience across Ethereum and Base may need to support two distinct native account abstraction formats, testing, auditing and maintaining each.

Two chains, two standards

Ethereum is now advancing Frame Transactions under EIP-8141 as a headliner item of its Hegotá upgrade. The proposal introduces native account abstraction to the base layer and creates a path toward post-quantum authentication, an increasingly prominent concern among protocol researchers. The Ethereum Foundation named EIP-8141 among the must-ship items for Hegotá in a Sept. 7 blog post, elevating it alongside the upgrade’s headline scalability work.

Base, meanwhile, is developing native account abstraction via Keystore under EIP-8130, a specification that is currently live on devnet. The Base approach is optimized for the L2’s scalability-first design, with keystore-style accounts intended to make smart wallet operation cheaper and simpler at high transaction volumes.

Chiang argued the split reflects different priorities rather than simple disagreement. Layer-1s are increasingly focused on censorship resistance, capture resistance, open-source guarantees, privacy and security features, priorities that favor Ethereum’s more conservative, security-first account design. Scalability-focused L2s align more naturally with standards such as EIP-8130, where throughput and cost dominate the requirement set.

The researcher also pushed back on the idea that divergence is inherently bad. Both Ethereum and Base are now “free to innovate on AA to the maximal extent in accordance with their own visions,” he wrote, suggesting that forcing a compromise standard would have diluted both designs.

The interoperability bill comes due at the wallet layer

The cost of that freedom does not disappear; it migrates. Wallet developers, from browser extensions to mobile smart-wallet startups, now face a matrix of account abstraction implementations across the two largest ecosystems by transaction volume. Each format carries its own validation rules, fee-payment semantics and signature schemes. Teams that previously targeted a single emerging standard must now budget for parallel implementations, or ship different wallet capabilities depending on which network a user is on.

The episode is a test of a long-standing claim in the Ethereum community: that the ecosystem’s composability extends across layers through shared standards rather than protocol mandates. With Ethereum and Base, the two most-used networks in the space by many measures, failing to converge on this piece of infrastructure, other L2s are likely to face pressure to pick a side, deepening the fork rather than healing it.

The roadmap context

The split lands at a consequential moment for Ethereum’s upgrade pipeline. Hegotá, which could begin implementation in late 2026 following Glamsterdam, would carry EIP-8141 onto the base layer. Glamsterdam itself, expected on mainnet in the second half of 2026 according to the public roadmap, is designed to improve scalability, harden the L1 and make the network easier to use, and is widely regarded as one of the most consequential upgrades of the year.

Native account abstraction has been a community goal for the better part of a decade, progressing through the ERC-4337 mempool-based workaround and a succession of RIP and EIP proposals. EIP-8141’s elevation to headliner status represents the culmination of that arc, embedding programmable accounts into the protocol itself rather than simulating them with a parallel transaction mempool.

What to watch

Three things will determine how costly the split proves. First, whether wallet SDK providers abstract the difference, letting application developers write once and deploy across both standards. Second, whether Base’s EIP-8130 spec stabilizes on devnet or converges back toward Ethereum’s design as implementation feedback accumulates. Third, whether other layer-2s, Arbitrum, Optimism, Linea and others, publicly align with one camp, which would harden the fork into two de facto account ecosystems.

Chiang’s framing suggests the ecosystem is choosing deliberate divergence over forced convergence. For users, the experience may barely change at first. For the infrastructure layer underneath, the account abstraction unification story just got materially harder.