Even though its 2023 and the account abstraction hype in Web3 seems to come to an end, it’s still something essential to make the blockchain and crypto assets usable to the masses who never even heard about crypto.
One essential problem everybody is confronted with is gas fees. Aside from the fact that you have to know the native token of the chain you are in as well as have native tokens to pay for transactions, it can easily lead to non-technical users giving up on it (or use a centralized exchange).
From a developers perspective, dealing with this problem quickly makes you end up reading the EIP-4337 whitepaper (link).
But how does this translate to your approach of providing transactions in a gas-free version?
Let’s first dig into the individual pieces we will use in this tutorial:
- Magic
Magic allows you to abstract authentication for dedicated wallets (one which we will build).
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Stackup / userop.js
- What is Magic
- What is Userop.js / Stackup ?
- What is EIP-4337
- What is Zerodev
Magic creates a private key / signer in the background which can be used to generate a smart account using Stackup. Stackup provides an implementation of EIP-4337 which includes a bundler service and optionally a paymaster. It can use a default kernel such as Smartaccount.sol or a custom one such as Zerodev. The gas-less execution allows to create a truly different user experience, as the user doesn’t need to have gas to do their transactions. The private key from Magic acts as signer to sign transactions which are sent over to stackup. Stackup also maintains userop.js, a general purpose JavaScript library to interact with all kinds of account abstraction (even aside from Stackup itself).
Let’s look at a concrete example and walk through each step.