2026-11-04 –, Lotus Stage 3
ERC-4337 promised modular accounts, seamless onboarding, session keys, recovery, and gas abstraction. We put those promises to the test in two very different settings: first building one of the earliest fully self-custodial passkey wallets, then running the wallet infrastructure of an institution serving millions of users. This talk is a field report from production: what smart accounts actually deliver, and where the narrative outran reality.
Smart accounts are usually presented as a solved problem: ERC-4337 handles execution, ERC-7579 makes accounts modular, session keys delegate, passkeys onboard users, paymasters pay for gas. We have run this stack in production for four years, first at wallet scale and then at institutional scale, and most of what we learned is not written down anywhere.
Onboarding breaks in ways no spec mentions once passkeys meet real devices and password managers. Recovery is easy to design and hard to operate when real users lose real phones. Session keys promise clean delegation, but scoping them right is harder than the standards suggest. Gas abstraction works until a UserOperation passes simulation and reverts on-chain, or a bundler rejects a valid one because fees moved. Modularity adds audit surface faster than it adds flexibility.
Every failure comes with the fix that held. Builders leave with concrete guidelines for assembling an account stack that real users can rely on.
- Engineer at Paribu
- Co-founded Clave (acquired by Paribu)
- Co-author of RIP-7212 / EIP-7951 - Former RIP editor
- Ex-president of ITU Blockchain
- Engineer at Paribu
- Founding member of Clave (acquired by Paribu)
- Ex-president of ITU Blockchain