Base and Ethereum collaboration on account abstraction breaks down, leaving two competing standards

The effort to unify how Ethereum handles account abstraction just hit a wall. A collaboration between Base, Coinbase’s Layer 2 network, and Ethereum core developers to reconcile two competing proposals ended last week, according to Derek Chiang of Ethlabs, the founder of ZeroDev.

The two sides will now advance their respective standards independently: Base with EIP-8130, and Ethereum’s Layer 1 with EIP-8141, known as Frame Transactions. Both remain listed as active drafts in the official Ethereum Improvement Proposal registry, which means the ecosystem now has to grapple with two parallel paths to solving the same problem.

What account abstraction actually means, and why it matters

Account abstraction lets wallets do things that currently require clunky workarounds: sponsoring someone else’s gas fees, batching multiple transactions into one, logging in with a passkey instead of memorizing a seed phrase, and using custom authentication methods.

The existing standard for this, ERC-4337, works by layering these features on top of the Ethereum Virtual Machine rather than baking them into the protocol itself. Both EIP-8130 and EIP-8141 aimed to move account abstraction from that overlay approach to embedding it natively into the protocol layer.

The two proposals agreed on the core use cases. Gasless transactions, passkey-based wallets, transaction batching: all on the shared wish list. Where they diverged was on the values underlying the architecture.

The L1 vs. L2 philosophical rift

Ethereum’s Layer 1 developers prioritized censorship resistance, value capture, and privacy. EIP-8141 reflects that ethos, focusing on flexible transaction primitives designed for broad extensibility and post-quantum readiness. It remains in draft form and is expected to ship as part of Ethereum’s upcoming Hegotá upgrade.

Base and the broader Layer 2 camp had different priorities. Scalability and customization topped their list. EIP-8130 is already being tested on Base’s vibenet devnet and is designed for adoption across the OP Stack, the modular framework that powers Optimism, Base, and a growing number of rollups. The proposal claims up to a 63% reduction in gas costs for certain transfer types compared to the existing ERC-4337 approach.

Chiang acknowledged that while a unified standard would have created a more consistent multichain smart account experience, the fragmentation could still produce productive outcomes. Different chains have different needs, and forcing a single standard onto both L1 and L2 may have resulted in a compromise that satisfied nobody.

What fragmentation means for developers and users

The immediate practical consequence is that developers building smart account infrastructure now need to think about which standard they’re targeting. An application built on EIP-8130’s assumptions for Base or another OP Stack chain won’t automatically work the same way on Ethereum mainnet if EIP-8141 ships with different transaction primitives.

Account abstraction sits at a particularly sensitive layer of the stack because it governs how users authenticate, authorize, and pay for transactions. Fragmentation here ripples outward into wallet design, dApp interfaces, and cross-chain bridging.

The counterargument, and the one Chiang appears to lean toward, is that parallel innovation produces better outcomes than premature consensus. If EIP-8130 proves that native account abstraction can cut gas costs by 63% on L2s while EIP-8141 delivers quantum-resistant flexibility on L1, the ecosystem ends up with two strong tools rather than one mediocre compromise.

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