Account abstraction is a wildly diverse domain with many opinions forged over nearly a decade of research and development. We have honed in on the most capable and pure form and we have synthesized it into the frame transaction. In the desire for the perfect abstraction lies the root of contention. Several competing ideas have spawned to achieve similar goals. We will share a few thoughts for each. Alternatives to Frames EIP-8130: Account Abstraction by Account Configuration This is the "everything but the kitchen sink" proposal. It is comprehensive and well-thought-out. A few differences that are worth highlighting: All configs and nonces are stored in system contracts. This allows validation of transactions with a subset of the state, but it deviates from traditional account management where the smart account uses its own storage. The standard lays out accepted verifiers and some room for customization, however verifiers have no access to chain state beyond current nonce. This precludes trustless withdrawals from privacy protocols, among other use cases.
3/11/2026Add frame abstraction for transaction validation, execution, and gas payment
1/29/2026As of today, all Ethereum execution clients support history pruning for pre-merge data. For mainnet, this means 300-500 GB less disk space required to operate a node. Learn more about what this means and how to take advantage the new functionality: <insert link> If you're a full node operator or a validator, this change will not affect you beyond the space savings as history is not needed to validate the head of the chain. Archive node users and application developers who need the history to generate their custom indexes will need to begin migrating to external history providers as the history will become less available over the p2p with time. A list of providers can be found here: https://eth-clients.github.io/history-endpoints/ This is the first step towards full, rolling history expiry as defined in EIP-4444. Please see the EIP to learn more about the motivation for history expiry and the longer term plan history expiry: https://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-4444
7/7/2025As of today, all Ethereum execution clients support partial history expiry in accordance with EIP-4444. While work on full, rolling history expiry is ongoing, users can expect to reduce the disk space required for an Ethereum node by 300-500 GB by removing the block data prior to the merge. This will allow a node to fit comfortably on a 2 TB disk. See below for information on each specific client. Chain history By definition a blockchain is a chain of blocks starting at a specific genesis point. For Ethereum, that occurred on July 30, 2015. Each block includes information about the protocol itself, i.e. the current gas limit, a list of user transactions, and the result of those transactions encapsulated by a receipt. This data has many uses: Full validation of the chain requires executing every historical block to ensure that, not only is the current head state correct, but all historical states from genesis to today were correct. Constructing indexes over the chain history, e.g. tracking the balance changes of a certain account over time or how the state of a certain application changes. For L2s that have posted transactions using calldata, they would need the chain history to fully validate their chain or construct indexes. General proof-of-past operations such as proving a certain transaction was sent at some point. In rare cases, non-fungible token (NFT) data. But the prevailing method of hosting NFTs on-chain is to store the NFT data either in contract storage or reference external sources, such as IPFS.
7/7/2025