Empirical Validation of Account Abstraction: A Quantitative Analysis of Transaction Performance and Adoption Patterns in the Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

Account abstraction (AA) is a novel blockchain innovation which offers programmable account logic and enhanced transactions capabilities beyond traditional Externally Owned Accounts (EOAs) on Ethereum. Theoretical advantages of the technology include gasless transactions, strengthened privacy, batched transactions, and an elevated user experience; however, an empirical validation of AA’s proposed benefits remains limited. With over $81 billion dollars of digital assets secured across 110 million unique accounts in the Ethereum infrastructure, a robust evaluation of the technology’s proposed benefits is crucial. This study conducts a comprehensive quantitative analysis of AA adoption and performance across major blockchain platforms beyond solely Ethereum. Our methodology leveraged automated data collection from Etherscan and BundleBear APIs to gather transaction volumes, gas consumption patterns, failure rates, and other relevant transaction metrics for AA implementations holding more than a 1% DeFi market share. Afterwards, we completed a statistical analysis to compare the efficiency of AA transactions with traditional EOAs. The analysis revealed that an overwhelming majority of AA transactions were sponsored: about 99.2% of UserOperations had their gas paid by a paymaster. Moreover, we found that the ERC-4337 AA failure rate of 3.2% was substantially lower than the Optimism EOA failure rate of 5.0%. Finally, we noticed that a significant portion of AA transactions were batched as large bundlers–such as Alchemy and Coinbase–see around 2-3 UOs per transaction. Ultimately, this work provides a needed validation of AA’s many proposed benefits and lays the groundwork for future innovation atop the promising technology.