Ethereum news rarely comes with a breakup, but this one does. Ethereum and Base have dropped plans for a shared account-abstraction standard, and each will now go its own way. That’s according to Derek Chiang, an Ethlabs developer who co-authored one of the two proposals.
Ethereum is moving ahead with EIP-8141, known as Frame Transactions while Base is pursuing EIP-8130, a Keystore-based design. Talks between the two sides ended the week before Chiang’s post.
This is more than a dispute over implementation details. It’s a fork between the two most-watched networks in the Ethereum ecosystem. At stake is how each will make account abstraction native to the base layer. Account abstraction builds smart-wallet logic directly into how transactions are validated. Done natively, it would let users pay network fees without holding ETH and they could sign with a phone passkey and rotate keys without add-on infrastructure.
Chiang argues that wallet software can still hide the difference from end users. That claim will be tested as development continues. It’s worth watching alongside broader Ethereum network activity data.
Ethereum and Base: What Did the Failed Talks Try to Reconcile?
The effort tried to merge Base’s EIP-8130, written by Coinbase engineer Chris Hunter, with Ethereum’s EIP-8141. EIP-8130 pairs a new transaction type with an onchain Keystore and has each transaction name the authenticator that validates it, which gives nodes predictable costs. EIP-8141, or Frame Transactions, instead splits a transaction into “frames” that let an account define its own validation and gas payment in code.
This is a more flexible model but a heavier one for high-throughput chains, and it now carries a “must-ship” designation for Hegotá, Ethereum’s coming hard fork.
The two chains simply want different things. Ethereum weighs censorship resistance, privacy, and security; Base is built for scale, customization, and compliance. EIP-8130 accounts will still be able to reach other chains through the existing ERC-4337 standard, the smart-wallet framework both networks have relied on to date, which softens but does not eliminate the interoperability cost.
Ethereum News: Chiang’s Account of Why Compromise Failed
Chiang, describing the technical search that preceded the split, wrote: “While we identified a number of technical solutions, they all required one side or the other to compromise at least a little bit on their core goals.”
That framing places the failure not in a lack of engineering options but in the two networks’ unwillingness to trade off their respective priorities, an outcome that mirrors how ecosystem migrations. Similar to the recent shift covered in Ethereum’s Harmony migration: routinely surface interoperability friction once networks diverge technically.
The resulting burden falls on smart wallets, which may now need to support both transaction formats to serve users across Ethereum and Base. As Chiang put it: “So separate ways we went, putting the burden on wallets to deal with the fragmentation that ensues.”
Whether wallet providers can absorb that complexity without users noticing is the open question the industry now has to answer.
