Ethereum And Base Are Starting to go Separate Ways

Why the Talks Failed

Ethereum and Base have ended efforts to align their account abstraction standards, leaving EIP-8130 and EIP-8141 on separate development paths after their Frames collaboration broke down last week. The breakdown was confirmed by Derek Chiang of Ethlabs, the founder of ZeroDev.

Account abstraction allows smart-contract accounts to define their own validation logic rather than relying only on fixed rules for externally owned accounts. In plain terms, it is the technology that enables features like gasless transactions, passkey-based wallet logins, and batched operations, all without the workarounds users currently rely on.

Ethereum L1 and Base spent weeks trying to align their account abstraction proposals into a single framework. Chiang said engineers reviewed multiple technical paths during that period. Every option identified required one chain to soften goals central to its roadmap. Neither Ethereum L1 nor Base accepted a compromise significant enough to finalize.

As the industry develops, L1 and L2 have begun to diverge in value and use cases: L1 pursues censorship resistance, open source, privacy, and security, while L2 pursues scalability, customization, and compliance. Those differing mandates made a single shared standard unworkable.

Two Standards, Two Roads

The two sides will now advance their respective standards independently: Base with EIP-8130, and Ethereum's Layer 1 with EIP-8141, known as Frame Transactions. Both remain listed as active drafts in the official Ethereum Improvement Proposal registry, meaning the ecosystem now has to grapple with two parallel paths to solving the same problem.

Base engineer Lukas confirmed that Base will proceed in shipping EIP-8130 in an upgrade later this year, bringing native batch transactions, gas abstraction, performant key types, and key rotation via portable Keystores. In parallel, Ethereum L1 contributors have advanced EIP-8141 Frame Transactions as a headliner of the Hegota upgrade.

Ethlabs has described the central tradeoff: permissionless, EVM-based validation gives Frame Transactions flexibility for privacy and future signature systems, but dynamic validation costs can create challenges for high-throughput Layer 2s.

The practical burden falls on builders. Incompatible native transaction types would shift more integration work to wallet and application developers. Chiang said the failed effort was putting the burden on wallets to deal with the fragmentation that ensues, although he argued that software could still hide those differences from users.

Chiang said separate standards may not necessarily create a poor outcome, noting that both sides could make improvements to their features to suit their own technical purposes. Whether the ecosystem agrees with that reading remains to be seen.

Sources:
Crypto Briefing: Base and Ethereum collaboration on account abstraction breaks down
CoinGape: Ethereum, Base Split on EIP-8130 and EIP-8141 Standards
ETH Daily: Ethereum And Base Split On Account Abstraction