Limits of EOAs

EOAs have powered Ethereum since day one, but their design reflects early protocol constraints, not modern product expectations. One private key controls everything — there is no built-in recovery, no spending limit, and no way to delegate partial access.

Seed phrase anxiety drives users toward custodial exchanges. Gas requirements block onboarding — a new user with USDC still needs ETH before they can swap. Phishing targets signing prompts because every approval is all-or-nothing.

Account abstraction does not erase these risks, but it gives wallet developers primitives to address them: programmable validation, paymasters, session keys, and recovery flows that do not depend on a single 24-word backup.