Account Abstraction: EIP-7702

My EOA Now Identifies as a Smart Contract

The Pectra hardfork brought a very important upgrade to mainnet: EIP-7702.

EIP-7702 adds a very useful feature by allowing an externally owned account (EOA) to temporarily designate permission for an already-deployed contract to execute code on its behalf.

Most of the discussion I saw on EIP-7702 prior to its roll out highlighted the ability to implement transaction batching. DeFi users are familiar with the painful two-step approve & swap flow. EIP-7702 enables these calls to be batched together through a mechanism where smart contract code can be executed on behalf of an EOA.

The demonstrations I’ve seen cover how to hook a web wallet like Metamask up to a smart contract.

That’s not how we do things around here! We’ll learn how a code designation works, how the transaction is built, how it behaves onchain, and how to call this newly-upgraded EOA’s code.

Set Code Transaction

Before an EOA can act through a designated contract, it must designate that contract using a special transaction. EIP-2718 introduced a typing marker for transactions. A transaction that designates a contract for an EOA is assigned Type 4, and its characteristic is the inclusion of an authorization list containing at least one tuple specifying six inputs: