In summary, account abstraction moves crypto from the current approach of one-account-fits-all, where someone can lose everything with a small mistake, to a future where an account can be tailored to someone's needs. Where you can build a safety net for self-custody. And give them much slicker UX too.

This gets us so excited because it makes self-custody a viable option for a mainstream audience. An alternative to a scary world of seed phrases, or only relying on centralized exchanges.

• Enabling a simple, reliable and secure on-chain experience is one of, if not the, main challenge in our journey towards mass adoption.
• Do we really expect billions of people to borrow, lend, invest and pay on a financial system with no safeguards or safety nets? Normal people expect to see a "Forgot your password?" button when they login to an application. Just like they expect that they can call their bank to block a card that was lost or stolen.

To understand account abstraction we first need to understand how accounts work on Ethereum today:

External Owned Accounts (EOA)

Users own an EOA through a Signer, which is authorized to spend their tokens and the Account that holds their tokens. If you lose your Signer, you will lose access to your Account, which has the funds.

If you've ever interacted with EVM networks, then you'll most likely have used an EOA (Externally Owned Account). EOAs are accounts that are controlled by an external private key. Only an EOA can trigger transactions on the blockchain and this currently makes it the default model for most users. Many popular wallets like a Ledger device, MetaMask browser extension, or Rainbow mobile app are EOAs.

Smart Contract Wallet

Contract accounts are smart contracts that are separate from the signer. They can have their own logic for signing and recovery. This means that if you lose access to your account (signer), you don’t necessarily lose access to your contract account. This is the concept of Account Abstraction.