The account is abstract, and the landing is concrete? Read the account abstract developer Pimlico led by a16z

Written by Luccy, BlockBeats

BlockBeats News: On November 7, account abstraction developer Pimlico announced the completion of a $4.2 million seed round led by a16z crypto.

BlockBeats previously reported that on September 25, Pimlico announced the completion of a $1.6 million Pre-Seed round of funding, led by 1confirmation, with participation from Safe and Consensys, as well as more than a dozen angel investors. It is reported that Pimlico offers features including ERC-20 token gas payments, multisig schemes, social recovery, and spending limits.

Despite the market downturn and the unfulfilled promises of the crypto industry, there are still quite a few developers who are still enthusiastically committed, which is part of the reason why a significant portion of the industry’s funding is currently going to high-tech solutions. Pimlico is also one such startup.

1confirmation and a16z led the pitch

In less than three months, Pimlico closed a $1.6 million Pre-Seed round led by 1confirmation and a $4.2 million seed round led by a16z.

Just a few weeks after Pimlico was founded, founder and CEO Kristof Gazso attended a16z’s Spring 2023 Crypto Startup School in Los Angeles and completed its accelerator program. Kristof explains Pimlico’s mission in his blog, citing some of the investor reviews and use cases, and Sriram Krishnan, General Partner of a16z, explains his belief with Pimlico’s philosophy in his blog, which BlockBeats has compiled as follows:

Sriram Krishnan, General Partner, a16z:

One of the core promises of cryptocurrencies is self-sovereignty over digital goods and assets. Despite such promises, developers developing wallets or Web3 applications and experiences have long faced a dilemma of balancing optimizing the user experience with decentralization. In their quest to optimize the user experience, developers often choose hosted solutions at the expense of their sovereignty. And those who prioritize self-sovereignty and self-custody require users to manage 12 or 24-word mnemonic phrases.

In 2019, the concept of account abstraction emerged as the first step in a series of solutions for flexible, secure self-custody. In 2021, ERC-4337 was proposed and quickly became the first account abstraction standard to gain substantial momentum without requiring changes to Ethereum’s consensus layer. Kristof Gazso is one of the lead authors of ERC-4337, and his team includes Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin and a number of core Ethereum researchers.

When we first met Kristof Gazso, discussions around account abstraction were in the ascendant, and the company was founded to support the smart contract wallets of the future. Inspired by his account abstract speech at ETH Dubai, and recognizing his strong ties to core Ethereum developers, we quickly realized that Kristof is a world-class developer and we wanted to build an investment relationship with him.

A few months later, Kristof founded Pimlico, a suite of products that enables wallet developers to easily embed account abstractions. Pimlico is committed to making the crypto user experience simpler and more convenient by providing services such as gas fee sponsorship, ERC-20 token payments, social recovery programs, bulk transactions, spending limits, and different account access levels.

Just a few weeks after founding Pimlico, Kristof attended our Spring 2023 Crypto Startup School in Los Angeles. In just a few weeks, we were impressed with how quickly Kristof and the team delivered the product and built a significant early partnership with Pimlico. At the end of the Crypto Startup School, we were convinced that no one was better equipped to build a support infrastructure for account abstraction than Kristof.

We look forward to working with them as they work to enable Web3 to fulfill its promise of self-sovereignty through the ease of use and usability of Web2." We are also excited to be working with Kristof and the Pimlico team in our new London office, which is based in London, and we are excited to work with some of the best entrepreneurs in the UK ecosystem, of which Kristof is a great example."

Kristof Gazso, Founder & CEO, Pimlico:

Since its launch in 2015, the Ethereum protocol has been hard-coded to have each local account associated with a private key that users need to store securely. Storing these keys makes accounts more susceptible to hacking, phishing attacks, and human error. Pimlico was founded to make Ethereum easier to use by providing the infrastructure for a new generation of smart accounts.

These smart accounts can address many of the shortcomings of private key-based accounts by providing features such as customizable logic, gas sponsorship, gas payments with ERC-20 tokens, multisig schemes, social recovery, and spending limits. We expect a user-friendly account system with the features we expect.

Thanks to a proposal called ERC-4337, the pace of innovation in the smart account space has been dramatically accelerated. Co-authored by Vitalik Buterin, Yoav Weiss, Dror Tirosh, and myself, the proposal provides a comprehensive standard for smart account providers to rely on services like Pimlico instead of having to build all the underlying logic and infrastructure on their own.

At Pimlico, we’ve launched a package with three products. Our bundlers and verified payers have been providing reliable and fast relays for on-chain smart account transactions, acting as a gas sponsorship module that provides an easy way for developers to support more than 15 on-chain users and our ERC-20 payers. Developers can also provide users with the option to pay transaction fees using ERC-20 tokens such as USDC and DAI.

Many wallets are already using Pimlico in production to speed up delivery, focusing on providing the user experience to the end user without having to worry about building, maintaining, and scaling the underlying smart account infrastructure.

Here’s what some of our investors have to say about Pimlico:

Richard Chen, General Partner, 1confirmation: “The idea of account abstraction has been around since the dawn of Ethereum, but now EIP-4337 is finally here. Kristof is the co-author of the specification, and he’s the best founder we’ve ever met, abstracting accounts into wallet standards and improving the user experience of the app.”

Nick Tomaino, Founder and General Partner, 1confirmation: “Kristof is a killer founder who solves the biggest problem in crypto today – improving the user experience while keeping user control. When we spoke to developers building new wallets and dApps, it became clear that Pimlico was addressing a key pain point that could greatly benefit cryptocurrency adoption.”

Lukas Schor, Co-Founder of Safe: “Safe is proud to be one of the early supporters of Pimlico, a project with a technical focus that we believe aligns with Safe’s mission and values of accelerating the transition to smart accounts. We look forward to exploring further avenues for collaboration between the Safe and Pimlico teams around ERC-4337.”

Since the mainnet launch in early 2023, ERC-4337 has paved the way for the Cambrian Big Bang of new wallets and accounts due to the extremely high modularity it offers. Recently, we also launched permissionless.js, a library focused on simplifying the developer experience for developing wallets and applications with smart accounts.

Since the beginning of this year, we’ve seen developers adopt our solution to bundle and sponsor nearly 3 million user actions, covering more than 60% of all indexed user actions. We’re excited about some of the innovative use case projects built on the new paradigm of smart accounts and the Pimlico infrastructure, such as Daimo and Patch Wallet.

Daimo solves one of the oldest use cases that crypto promises: P2P payments. Their dedication to speed and simplicity, combined with the use of smart accounts for full gas extraction and FaceID signature verification (powered by Pimlico’s bundlers and USDC payers), makes the payment app feel better to use than similar web2 apps.

Patch Wallet brings features that weren’t possible before the advent of smart accounts. They allow anyone to send you tokens through your social accounts without requiring you to create a wallet beforehand. In addition to creating social airdrops directly to your Twitter followers or email newsletter readers, this new model allows you to join web3 using your existing social accounts, providing an easy way to attract a large number of new users to cryptocurrency.

Pimlico: Embedding account abstraction for wallet developers

Pimlico is an infrastructure platform for building the next generation of smart accounts. Bundlers, verified Paymasters, ERC-20 payers, and more for developers who are developing ERC-4337 smart accounts to develop more user-friendly decentralized applications or dApps.

ERC-4337

ERC-4337 is a key technology upgrade recently implemented by Ethereum, with the most active developers of any blockchain network.

ERC-4337 standardizes how “smart accounts” interact with the associated infrastructure, making it easier for developers to enable features such as email recovery, social logins, and so-called gas fee sponsorship. For those unfamiliar with cryptocurrency, gas fees have been a major inconvenience for users who need to pay transaction fees with the network’s native token, and Pimlico aims to remove this barrier for users.

As a result of these technological improvements, dApp developers were finally able to program features that have long been the standard for Web 2 user accounts, which the industry sees as a critical step in the mass adoption of self-custody wallets. This is important because after the collapse of FTX exposed the risks associated with centralized finance, there was a wave of users shifting from centralized exchanges to self-sovereignty over their assets.

The ERC-4337 standard is designed to make Ethereum wallets easier to use and help prevent users from losing access to cryptocurrencies. To achieve this, the creators of Ethereum propose to turn wallets into smart contracts. Smart contracts have built-in mechanisms that can help users keep their cryptocurrencies safe even if they forget their password or lose their private key, a key feature that includes the option to require multiple people to approve transactions, and a system where multiple users can help restore access to an account if someone loses their private key.

Permissionless.js is a viem-built Type library for interacting with ERC-4337 bundlers, payment supervisors, and user actions.

Alto, written in Type, developed by Pimlico, is a high-performance, type-safe ERC-4337 bundler. Alto is currently operational, but it is still in active development and is not fully functional. Pimlico’s focus is on complete type safety, reliability (even in the event of a sudden spike in gas prices or chain reorganization), and speed.

Currently, according to bundlebear data, Pimlico bundler has the highest market share of monthly user actions performed and monthly user operations.

! [Account abstraction, landing concrete?] Read the account abstract developer Pimlico led by a16z] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-69a80767fe-501653e76c-dd1a6f-cd5cc0.webp)

Pimlico’s verification Paymaster is a combination of an API and an on-chain smart contract that allows developers to sponsor gas fees for their users. By calling Pimlico’s API, a signature is received, which will be accepted by Pimlico’s smart contract and the user’s gas fee will be paid.

Pimlique’s ERC-20 Paymaster is an on-chain ERC-4337 Paymaster that is able to pay users’ gas fees in exchange for ERC-20 tokens.

Team

Headquartered in London, Kristof has five employees around the world, and Kristof will relocate all of its employees to London after the new round of funding. Explaining the decision, the founder said: “While you’ll see magnetism in places like Silicon Valley and New York, London is really establishing itself as the world’s new crypto hub.”

After co-authoring ERC-4337 with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin and others, Kristof realized that there were still many friction points for developers to overcome to get the most out of the new standard, so he decided to build a set of tools that would make it easy for developers to embed account abstractions. Kristof said his goal is to “easily build and scale their smart accounts by reducing the burden on them to build their own relay and sponsorship infrastructure.”

Using Web 2 as an example, Pimlico is committed to doing what Stripe is doing in the digital payments industry. “There were a lot of people who wanted to allow payments on the internet, and that was one of the early promises, but no one really built a very easy-to-use, very simple plugin, which is a payment network,” Kristof adds.