The change would make recovering wallets significantly easier
The fear of losing cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases keeps some users up at night. However, the upcoming Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3074 upgrade comes with a new Petra hard fork “social recovery” feature that could solve Ethereum users’ problem of losing their seed phrases.
According to a blog post by Ethereum Foundation researcher “Domothy,” Ethereum wallets will soon have upgraded features with “supercharging” capacities to allow users to recover assets and use new smart contracts capabilities. On April 11, Tim Beiko, a developer for Ethereum core, confirmed in an X post that EIP-3074 is now part of the Pectra hard fork.
To take advantage of the social recovery tool, users must transfer asset ownership to an invoker contract employing a digital signature. The contract will then handle future transactions on behalf of the user. After delegating ownership, the digital signature’s message allows users to recover assets if their seed phrase is forgotten or lost.
Cryptocurrency commentator Cygaar explained how the feature works with the implementation of the “”AUTH” and “AUTHCALL” opcodes in an April 11 X post. “This could be huge for gaining mass retail adoption,” Cygaar remarked.
This is how the 3074 flow works:
– User signs a message (off-chain, not a tx)
– User or sponsor sends the message to an invoker contract as a tx
– Invoker uses AUTH and AUTHCALL to verify and call each target contract with the user's address as the sender pic.twitter.com/S0lLh0RnfT— cygaar (@0xCygaar) April 11, 2024
AUTH verifies a user’s signature and intended action, while AUTHCALL calls the target contract to complete the transaction but allocates the user as the caller rather than the invoker contract.
Billions of dollars in cryptocurrency are estimated to have been lost through the years due to customers losing their private keys.
One of the most significant advantages of using EIP-3074 is that users won’t be required to have Ether in their wallet to send transactions, as the entity behind the invoker contract pays for it in advance.
The Pectra hard fork is expected to launch later this year or early 2025.
