A Measurement Investigation of ERC-4337 Smart Contracts on Ethereum Blockchain

Abstract

Account abstraction is a method that enhances the flexibility and extensibility of blockchain accounts. For the Ethereum blockchain, ERC-4337 is a proposal for implementing account abstraction without modifying the logic of the underlying consensus protocol. However, due to its complete implementation through smart contracts, the transaction costs associated with ERC-4337 remain expensive compared to regular Externally Owned Account (EOA) transactions. To evaluate the usage costs of ERC-4337, we introduce two innovative algorithms: the ERC-4337 Classification Algorithm and the ERC-4337 Gas Measure-ment Algorithm. The Classification Algorithm categorizes historical ERC-4337 transactions and logs, providing valuable insights into their nature and characteristics. The Gas Measurement Algorithm calculates the actual gas consumption for users and the incentives paid to bundlers that package the transactions of ERC-4337 (UserOperation) into an Ethereum standard transaction. We have implemented these algorithms within the official ERC-4337 deployment on the Ethereum network. Our findings indicate that creating an ERC-4337 account costs 381,489 gas, allowing only 78 accounts per block. Furthermore, a basic ERC-4337 transfer consumes 92,901 gas, which is four times the gas cost of an EOA transfer. These results confirm that high gas fees continue to pose a significant obstacle to the widespread adoption of ERC-4337. Moreover, our proposed algorithms can serve as a valuable toolset for evaluating the usage costs associated with different account abstraction proposals on Ethereum to contribute to the assessment and improvement of account abstraction mechanisms.